Persian Auto Captions

Persian-language short-form content has an enormous audience inside Iran, where Instagram is the dominant social platform, and a large diaspora in Canada, Germany, the United States and the Gulf that follows Persian podcasts and YouTube interview shows. Dari speakers in Afghanistan and the diaspora share much of the same content, and captions carry clips across all of it.

Persian is written right to left in the Perso-Arabic script, with four letters Arabic does not have and a cursive form where letters join and change shape by position. Short vowels are not written, and the zero-width joiner matters for correct word shapes in some compounds. Crayo transcribes the speech into Persian script when selected; names, English loanwords and colloquial Tehrani forms are the lines to check in the caption list.

A practical tip for Persian clips: preview the caption style on the actual clip before export, since right-to-left cursive text looks different across the fonts the 32 styles use, and keep captions to a few words so the joined letter forms stay large and legible on a phone.