How to Add Text, Text-to-Speech, and Auto Captions on TikTok

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Add some flair and accessibility to your TikTok videos with text and captions

Co-authored by Hannah Dillon Reviewed by Stan Kats

Last Updated: July 30, 2023 Fact Checked

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Adding Text to a TikTok

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Setting Text Duration

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Text-to-Speech

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Auto Captions

Have you made an awesome TikTok but you're a little confused about how to add text? Or maybe you're interested in text-to-speech or auto captions to increase accessibility on your videos. No matter why you're looking to add text to your TikTok the app has made it pretty simple to do. In this article we'll teach you how to add and edit text on your TikToks, how to add text-to-speech to the text in your videos, and how to add auto captions so you don't have to type out everything you said in your video yourself.

Things You Should Know

You can add text by pressing the Aa button after you've recorded your video.
Tap the text you added to set the duration of the text or to add text-to-speech.
Select the auto caption button on the right-side menu to automatically transcribe everything you said in your video at the click of a button.

Section 1 of 4:

Adding Text to a TikTok

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This will take you to the TikTok creation screen.

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You can record a TikTok of any length up to 10 minutes, or just add a photo.
It's on the right-hand side. This will allow you to put text on your video.
You can use the options in the text menu to change the text style, background, alignment, and color. Simply tap on the options to see how they look with your video.
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Tap outside the text box to deselect it.
- You can tap the text box at any time during the editing process to edit what it says or the text style. Simply select Edit from the contextual popup menu.
You can put the text anywhere on your TikTok, but if you place it in the bottom left corner it will likely be covered up by your username and video description.
You can use this gesture to make your text bigger or smaller. ^{[1]
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On the next menu you can add a video description, hashtags , tag people, and edit other upload settings before posting the video.

Section 2 of 4:

Setting Text Duration

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A contextual menu will pop up.
It's the second option on the menu.
You can add multiple sections of text to your video and arrange them on the timeline screen so each textbox will show at different times during the video.
If you're happy with how your text is laid out in the timeline, you can save the video and preview it to ensure the text shows up when you want it to.

Section 3 of 4:

Text-to-Speech

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A contextual menu will pop up.
It's the top option on the menu.
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Select a voice. There are a number of voices you can choose from and TikTok will play a preview of them in the text-to-speech menu.
- If you want all of the text in your video to have the same voice, tap the circle next to "Apply voice to all text in this video."
- If you want different voices for each line, you'll have to set them manually.
You can tap on the text again and select Change voice to change the text-to-speech voice.

Section 4 of 4:

Auto Captions

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It's the bottom icon on the list, and looks like a white box with some back lines at the bottom.
Auto captions can only work if it knows what language to listen for, so if it can't detect what you're saying, make sure the language is set to the same language you are speaking. You can change it by tapping the world icon near the bottom of the screen. ^{[2]
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It's near the bottom and you can adjust your text style, alignment, and color.
If you notice your auto captions didn't pick up the right word, you can edit it by tapping the pencil icon.
You can tap and drag to reposition where your captions will go.
You can tap the auto captions button again to edit the captions if you need to later.