Apple had a busy week. Not only did the company release iOS 18.1 and Apple Intelligence, it released three new M4-powered Macs—an iMac, all-new Mac mini, and MacBook Pros—on three consecutive days. In introducing the Mac mini on Tuesday, product manager Shloka Kini teased a forthcoming update to Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing app includes the ability to automatically transcribe audio into captions.
The tease was noted by Jeff Benjamin at 9to5 Mac.
I’m the furthest thing from a video editor, so Final Cut Pro isn’t in my wheelhouse. Nevertheless, the ability to transcribe spoken audio and transform them into captions has obvious benefit for accessibility. The best part about it is it’s baked into the app. As Benjamin writes, the functionality can be replicated by third-parties such as MotionVFX’s mCaptions. The downside, of course, the capability comes not without a cost. The fact Final Cut Pro will have the captioning feature built-in “for free” means a video editor—who may have a disability and thus may not have tons of disposable income—can have what they need without having to open their wallet in order to get it. Moreover, for people consuming the content, it makes things like voiceovers accessible when they otherwise perhaps wouldn’t be. Lastly, as Benjamin astutely notes, short-form video like Instagram Reels and TikTok are being increasingly inclusive by creators adding captions to their videos. This means, to cite one obvious example, a Deaf and/or hard-of-hearing person can enjoy Reels like anyone else because they’re able to understand the dialogue.
At a technical level, the audio-to captions feature is newsworthy as, as Benjamin also notes, Apple is boasting about how “tasks like speech-to-text processing is up to 13× faster than Intel-based Macs when compared to M4.” This means, according to Benjamin, the transcription process should be nigh instantaneous. The performance gains here track with Apple’s positioning of the new Mac mini, available with M4 and M4 Pro chips, as machines more than performant enough to run Apple Intelligence and other machine learning tasks. However purely speculative on my nerdy part, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if this Final Cut Pro feature was mentioned coincident with the Mac mini precisely because it requires the M4’s brawn in order to work optimally.
Benjamin himself speculates it’s plausible Final Cut Pro’s transcription feature, along with a new Magnetic Mask function also teased this week, soon will be unveiled at the FCP Creative Summit held in Cupertino. He writes that “attendees have traditionally been given a special behind-the-scenes look at unreleased versions” of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.
No word as to whether transcription will make it to iPadOS.