French subtitle generator
French is where the choice of model matters: the Accurate model gets 15% of words wrong in OpenAI’s figures, the Fast one 28.5%. Shycut writes them on your device.
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How often it gets a French word wrong
| Model in Shycut | Word error rate | Roughly | From the paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accurate (Whisper small) | 15% | 1 word in 7 | Table 13, “Whisper small” row, French column · OpenAI |
| Fast (Whisper base) | 28.5% | 1 word in 4 | Table 13, “Whisper base” row, French column · OpenAI |
Word error rate is the share of words a model gets wrong (swapped, missed or added) against a human transcript, in OpenAI’s own test on the FLEURS speech set; lower is better.
Shycut runs these two models converted to work in a browser (with 8-bit or 4-bit weights on some devices), so its results can differ a little from the paper’s.
Which model to pick
- Accurate
- Makes 47% fewer mistakes in French than Fast. A one-time download of about 300 MB, kept on your device.
- Fast
- About 100 MB to download and quicker to run, at about 1 word in 4 wrong instead of 1 in 7.
- Either way
- Correct any line in the Captions tab before saving; the speech never leaves your device.
Pick Accurate for French
Accurate makes 47% fewer mistakes than Fast in French, close to half. That is the difference between about 1 word in 7 to fix and about 1 in 4.
French comes seventh of the 10 languages Shycut offers. Read the lines through before saving: names, numbers and words that sound alike are where corrections usually go.
Need English captions for French speech? Translate it instead.
How to do it in Shycut
Open your video
The button opens Shycut with the captions set to French, ready to write.
Write the captions
The speech model downloads once, then turns the speech into timed lines in this browser tab.
Check, then save
Fix names and terms, pick a caption style, and save the video with the captions in it, or download them as an SRT file.
Where these facts come from
Questions
Which model should I use for French?
Accurate: 15% of words wrong against 28.5% for Fast, in OpenAI’s test.
Can I translate French speech into English captions?
Yes. The French translation page shows the model’s translation score.
Is the video uploaded?
No. Everything runs in your browser after a one-time model download.
Your video stays with you.
Open Shycut, drop the video in and export. Free, with no account, and your video never leaves your device.
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