About this plugin
Pick a video in your Media Library, press one button, and get a subtitle file attached to it. Visitors then see a subtitles button on the video player. The speech-to-text runs in the browser , on the machine of whoever pressed the button. Not on your server, and not on anyone’s API. That single decision is what this plugin is, and everything below follows from it. Nothing leaves the computer There are two ways to turn speech into text: send the audio somewhere and get the words back, or run the model where the audio already is. This plugin does the second. For a marketing clip either way is fine. For patient education, legal recordings, internal training, HR material or paid membership content, sending the file to a third party is often the difference between allowed and not allowed . The browser reads the file, works on it, and writes the result back. The only thing that ever downloads is the speech model itself, once. No account, no key, no bill Nothing to sign up for. No OpenAI account, no API key to create, store, rotate or explain to a client. No per-minute charge. Transcription services meter audio by the minute. Nothing here is metered — caption the same course twice, or a hundred hours of it, and the cost does not change. No server load. Your host never transcodes or transcribes anything, so this runs on the cheapest shared hosting without a queue, a cron job or a worker process. How it works Go to Media > Bharti Subtitles , choose a video and the spoken language, press Generate subtitles Watch the lines appear, then fix anything the model misheard — names and technical words are usually where it slips Press Save to this video . The .vtt is written beside the video and attached to it Or download .srt / .vtt instead and take it to YouTube, Vimeo or a video editor. What you get 17 languages, including Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish written in Roman script Every line editable before you save Works with the Gutenberg Video block and the classic [video] shortcode Control how the subtitles look — font, size, bold, capitals, colour, background and opacity, shadow, position and alignment — with a live preview Translation ready, with a .pot file included Accessibility Captions for prerecorded video are a WCAG 2.1 requirement (Success Criterion 1.2.2). If your site has an accessibility obligation, this is one of the items on the list. Honest limits Most of this would normally be left out of a plugin page. It is here because the wrong expectation wastes your time and mine. The first run downloads the speech model — about 50 MB for most languages, about 250 MB for Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish, which need a larger one. The browser keeps it, so it is once per machine, not once per video. Speed depends on the machine, not the hosting. A modern laptop manages roughly real time or better. An old one will be slower. No bulk or overnight processing. One video at a time, with a browser tab open. Doing it in bulk would mean a server doing the work, and then the zero cost and the privacy both disappear. Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish need more correcting than English. The model has seen far less of them. What you get is a usable draft to fix, which is much faster than typing from nothing — but it is a draft, and the panel says so before you press the button. The video must be one your browser can play. MP4 (H.264 + AAC) and WebM are safest. HEVC inside a .mov will not decode. What it needs A current version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari An internet connection the first time, to download the speech model A writable uploads folder — the .vtt is saved beside the video Source code and build The two files in assets/js/ are built, not written by hand. Their complete source ships inside this plugin so nothing needs to be taken on trust: src/ — all of the TypeScript and React that becomes them package.json , tsconfig.json , vite.config.ts , vite.worker.config.ts — the build configuration To rebuild from that source: npm install npm run build which regenerates assets/js/subtitles.js and assets/js/transcribe-worker.js exactly as shipped. Third-party code Bundled into those two files by the build, both unmodified: React 18.3 — https://github.com/facebook/react — MIT Transformers.js 3.8.1 — https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.js — Apache-2.0 External services Two things are downloaded into the browser the first time you generate subtitles, and then kept by the browser’s cache. Nothing is uploaded, no account is needed, and no key is required. The speech engine What: ONNX Runtime Web, the WebAssembly engine that runs the model. Part of Transformers.js, pinned to version 3.8.1. Server: jsDelivr — https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@huggingface/[email protected]/dist/ When: the first time you press Generate subtitles, once per browser. Sent: nothing. It is a download. The speech model What: an OpenAI Whisper model, converted for the browser. About 50 MB for most languages, about 250 MB for Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish. Server: Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/ When: the first time you use a given language, once per browser. Sent: nothing. It is a download. Your video is never sent to either of them, or to anywhere else. It is read from your own Media Library by your own browser and worked on there. Terms and privacy: jsDelivr — https://www.jsdelivr.com/terms and https://www.jsdelivr.com/terms/privacy-policy-jsdelivr-net · Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/terms-of-service and https://huggingface.co/privacy Serving them yourself If your site cannot reach an outside server — some government, medical and internal deployments cannot, and jsDelivr is blocked in some countries — put the files on your own host and point the plugin at them: add_filter( 'bharti_subtitles_wasm_paths', function () { return 'https://example.com/onnx/'; } ); The files to copy are the contents of @huggingface/[email protected]/dist/ . The model can be self-hosted the same way; see the Transformers.js documentation for env.remoteHost . Be honest with yourself about this before installing: if the first run cannot reach these two servers, the plugin cannot generate subtitles. After that first run it works offline.