About ReelToText
ReelToText is maintained by an independent developer.
What this site does
ReelToText turns a video or audio file into text you can copy or download as subtitles. Two tools sit on this site, built on the same engine: the TikTok transcript generator, which turns a TikTok video into text, and the Instagram transcript generator, which does the same for Instagram Reels and video. Both write out plain text with timestamps and can export TXT, SRT or VTT.
Neither tool is limited to the platform in its name. Any video or audio file the browser can decode will work — a screen recording, a podcast episode, a voice memo, a downloaded clip.
Your file is processed in your browser and is not uploaded
The file you choose is read, decoded and transcribed inside your own browser, and it is never sent to a server. There is no backend on this site that could receive it: the transcription runs locally through WebAssembly, and the only thing the page downloads is the speech-recognition model itself. You can read the detail in the privacy policy.
How it is built
The speech recognition engine is Whisper, the open model published by OpenAI. The browser build comes from the open-source Xenova/Transformers.js project, running the model through ONNX Runtime Web compiled to WebAssembly. The model weights are fetched from Hugging Face the first time you transcribe, and your browser caches them, so later runs start faster.
What this site is not
ReelToText is not affiliated with TikTok, Instagram or Meta, and it is not affiliated with OpenAI, Hugging Face or the Transformers.js project. Platform names are used only to describe what the tools are for.
Cost
Both tools are free and need no account. Running the model costs nothing to serve, because the work happens on your device rather than on a server. Advertising may be added later to cover the cost of the domain and hosting; the privacy policy explains what that would involve.
Corrections and questions
If something on this site is wrong, or a tool does not work the way this page says it does, that is worth fixing. The contact page has the address.