Subtitles + Pronunciation
Learn to say the words you read in subtitles
Select a word in an on-screen subtitle or caption, press Alt+Q (Option+Q on Mac), and its IPA and native audio appear in a floating overlay — without leaving the show you are watching.
Works on selectable captions; screenshot OCR reads burned-in subtitles. macOS & Windows.
The immersion–pronunciation gap
Watching shows with subtitles is one of the best ways to build a feel for a language. You see new words in context, again and again, and you start to recognize them on sight. But recognition is not the same as production: you can read a word in a caption and still have no idea how it actually sounds out loud.
Spelling does not tell you. A French caption shows bonjour, but the silent letters and the nasal vowel are invisible until you see /bɔ̃.ʒuʁ/. Stopping to look each word up in a dictionary breaks the immersion that made the show worth watching in the first place — so most people never close the gap between the words they recognize and the words they can say.
How it works on subtitles
IPAtics works on what is already on your screen. Two paths cover almost every kind of subtitle.
Selectable captions
Many setups render subtitles as real, selectable text — browser-based players, Language-Reactor-style extensions, media players that show a text track, and ebooks.
Highlight the word and press Alt+Q. The IPA appears in the overlay with audio, right on top of the caption.
Burned-in or image subtitles
Some video has subtitles baked into the picture, so there is no text to select — and the same is true of any caption that is part of the image.
Use screenshot OCR mode: capture the region with the subtitle, and IPAtics reads the text from the image and transcribes it to IPA with audio.
IPAtics does not integrate with Netflix or any streaming service and does not change how players work — it simply acts on text and images that are already on your screen.
What you get for each word
Every word you pull from a subtitle turns into something you can actually say and remember.
IPA, instantly
The word from the subtitle is transcribed to IPA in a floating overlay — bonjour as /bɔ̃.ʒuʁ/, ありがとう as /a.ɾi.ɡa.toː/ — so you see exactly how it is pronounced.
Native audio
Play native text-to-speech for the word so reading the transcription and hearing the sound happen together.
Tap any symbol
Tap an IPA glyph for its phonetic name and example words — useful when a caption introduces a sound your language does not have.
Save for review
Save the word and generate Anki cards with IPA and audio already filled in, so the vocabulary you met on screen comes back for spaced review.
Three steps, mid-episode
Pause and select the word
When a caption shows a word you do not know how to say, pause and highlight it. If the subtitle is burned into the picture, capture it with screenshot OCR instead.
Press Alt+Q
IPAtics auto-detects the language and shows the IPA in a floating overlay over your video, with native audio ready to play.
Hear it, save it, keep watching
Play the audio, save the word for later, and close the overlay with Esc. The word is queued for review while you carry on with the show.
The same select-and-transcribe flow works on documents too — see the PDF to fluent pronunciation workflow, and turn saved words into review decks with automatic Anki pronunciation cards.
Frequently asked questions
Turn watching into pronunciation practice
Free for macOS and Windows, with 10 transcriptions a day to try it on tonight's episode. Or paste a line into the free web converter first.