A phrase-timed cue puts the whole line up and takes the whole line down. Karaoke keeps the line, and a clock walks through it: the current token takes the accent, the rest wait. That clock is a word timestamp, not a style preset. Forced-alignment is how you get the clock from a known transcript. Speech-to-text is how you get the words. Burn-in is how the look survives a muted feed that will never enable a sidecar.
Word-highlight captions, on this site, are the two timed families — Snap and Reveal — that actually spend that clock. Karaoke is the wider name editors use for the same timing model, including a burn that pops one word at a time with no leftover line, and including a player that underlines tokens in a closed-caption track. SubRip cannot represent per-word highlight. If a client asks for karaoke in an .srt, they want a burned MP4 plus a plain sidecar for archive, or they have the wrong extension in the brief.
A silent product plate has no word to time. An authored overlay nobody said is not karaoke — that is text you wrote. Apply the timed pass on speech, then keep the active word off the mouth and off the platform chrome. Caption timing is still the complaint when the accent is late; the preset is not.
In practice
- Generate word timestamps, then pick a timed family; restyling a block subtitle will not invent a clock.
- Watch the burn on mute at phone size. If the accent trails the mouth, that is alignment, not colour.
- Do not send karaoke as an SRT. Burn the look; keep the sidecar as words and line times.
The mistake to avoid
Calling any punchy caption karaoke. If the line appears as a block, it is a subtitle. Karaoke is a word clock.
Where you will run into it
- Add Captions to a Video — Speech in, styled subtitles out — no manual timing.
- Add Timed Text Overlays to a Video — Different words at different moments — you set the clock.
- AI Caption Generator — Drop a video, get timed captions. Free, on your device, no upload.
Related terms
Word-highlight captions
Word-highlight captions are burned-in subtitles that light up each word as it is spoken, using word-level timing and a caption-style accent colour.
Burned-in captions
Burned-in captions meaning: subtitles rendered into pixels, so viewers cannot turn them off or lose them on re-upload. Closed captions are a separate track.
Caption timing
Caption timing is when each line appears and disappears relative to the speech — the clock, not the words and not the look.
Word timestamp
A word timestamp is the start (and usually end) time of one spoken token — the clock karaoke captions and word-highlight styles consume.
Hook rate
Hook rate meaning: the share of people shown a video who are still watching a few seconds in. It grades the opening, not the body.
The all-in-one AI studio for creators. 60+ models for video, image, voice, music and lipsync, in your browser or on your phone.
Free on the web and on iPhone, one account.