Hinglish captions: Devanagari or Roman script?

Devanagari is the script Hindi is normally written in. Roman Hinglish writes the same spoken Hindi with English letters. The words are the same; only the alphabet on screen differs.

“Hinglish” gets used for two different things, which causes confusion. It can mean speech that mixes Hindi and English, and it can mean Hindi written in Roman letters. In CutXflow the same speech model transcribes mixed Hindi and English speech whichever option you pick. The Hinglish option only decides which alphabet the captions use.

For Hindi audio, CutXflow asks its speech-to-text service for a Hindi transcript with a timestamp on every word. That service writes Hindi speech in Devanagari. Choosing Hindi (Devanagari) shows the transcript as it comes back.

Choosing Hinglish (Latin) adds one step after transcription: each Devanagari word is converted to Roman letters by a fixed set of rules on CutXflow's server. Because every word is rewritten in place, its start time, end time and confidence stay exactly as they were.

The rules aim for how Hindi is commonly typed in English letters (बहुत becomes bahut, घूमने becomes ghoomne) rather than textbook transliteration with accent marks. They drop the final vowel where a Hindi speaker would, leave words that are already in English letters, digits and punctuation alone, and restore a short list of very common English words that the model writes in Devanagari, such as सब्सक्राइब to subscribe and फ्रेंड्स to friends.

This is a rule-based conversion, not a second AI pass. That makes it predictable and fast, and it also means it cannot know which spelling you prefer.

Choose the script your audience already reads and types. If you are not sure, look at the comments under your last few videos: the alphabet people use there is a good guide.

The script is chosen before transcription, so changing your mind means running the video again, which uses transcription time again. If you are unsure, run 10 to 15 seconds of the same speaker in each script first, especially on the free plan, which includes 3 min of transcription a month.

Roman Hindi has no official spelling, so the rules will sometimes pick one you would not. Common words come out in familiar spellings: क्या becomes kya, मैं becomes main, में becomes mein and आज becomes aaj. The words in the table below come out differently from how many people type them. All of them are real outputs of the current rules, checked on 21 September 2026.

The last row is the general pattern for English words that are not on the short list: they are spelled out by sound. Fix any word by double-clicking it in the Script & Captions list. Your edit is what appears in the preview and in the exported video.

Devanagari output skips this conversion, so it has no conversion-related spelling variants. Recognition mistakes can still happen in both scripts.

Yes. Every caption font in CutXflow falls back to Noto Sans Devanagari, so Hindi text is drawn as letters instead of empty boxes, even in display fonts that have no Devanagari glyphs of their own. The same fallback is used when the video is exported, not only in the preview. Roman captions work in every font. A Devanagari word set in the fallback font will not look like the rest of the caption's typeface, so check the preview before you export.

It does not change the timing. Both options send the same Hindi request to the speech service, and the Roman conversion rewrites each word in place without touching its timestamps. Recognition is the same for the same audio; what differs is the spelling you see. How well either script turns out depends on how clean the recording is, and the editor tints low-confidence words amber in both.