Apple this week previewed new accessibility features that are coming later this year, and one is particularly notable: automatic captions for personal videos.
For videos that do not already have captions, Apple said a new on-device speech recognition model can automatically generate them for spoken audio. According to Apple, this feature will be available for videos that you record on your iPhone, videos that you receive from friends and family, and videos that are streamed online.
The automatic captions will initially be limited to English in the U.S. and Canada.
Apple ensured that the captions are generated privately, and you will be able to customize their appearance in the video playback menu or in the Settings app. The feature will be supported across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, with the "later this year" timing pointing to iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27.
Apple will unveil those software versions during its WWDC 2026 keynote, which begins on Monday, June 8 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, so we expect to learn more about this feature and its exact implementation in a few weeks from now.