🇫🇷 Made in France

Built by one French indie maker who was tired of AI tools that treat his language as an afterthought.

HaikuClip exists because every major AI video clipping tool on the market — Opus Clip, Submagic, Vizard — was built with English as the default language. French was bolted on later, and it shows. So I built the tool I actually wanted to use.

The moment it clicked

I was trying to turn a 90-minute interview with a French entrepreneur into TikTok clips. I uploaded it to Opus Clip, paid the $29 subscription, and watched as the tool confidently produced clips with: missing accents, broken contractions ("l' algorithme" instead of "l'algorithme"), no French typography (straight quotes, no em-dashes, no non-breaking spaces before : ; ? !), and worst of all — captions that cut mid-phrase at arbitrary 5-word intervals because the tokenizer was tuned for English.

I spent 45 minutes manually fixing the sub­titles of 10 clips. I realized: every French creator using this tool is either doing the same work, or giving up and posting bad-looking clips.

"I'm not going to build 'another Opus Clip'. I'm going to build the one that treats French like it's the primary language, not a translation target."

What I built

HaikuClip is an AI video clipping tool with a French-first pipeline — tokenization, punctuation, segmentation and accents are all tuned specifically for French (with English, Spanish, German and 47 others working equally well). On top of that, it's priced in euros, billed from France, RGPD-compliant by default, with no VCs, no cookie banners, and no tracking.

What I decided to keep, and what to skip

The tech stack, briefly

• AI scoring algorithm tuned on French podcast corpus (hooks, energy, keywords, narrative structure)
• Face tracking for reframe 16:9 → 9:16 using a local inference (no face data leaves the server)
• Karaoke caption renderer built with Pillow for pixel-precise output
• Scene detection + speaker anchor for robust clip boundaries on long-form content
• Transcription engine with per-language post-processing (the key French differentiator)

Why the name "HaikuClip"

A haiku is a short-form poem with strict constraints that, when well-executed, captures something larger. That's what a good short-form video clip is: 30 to 60 seconds that distill the essence of a longer piece of content. Also, Coupez was the original name (and the original domain still redirects), but HaikuClip ships in English-speaking markets too — and Coupez is a nightmare to pronounce if you're American.

What comes next

I don't have a roadmap screen with quarterly milestones. What I have is a growing list of features creators have asked for: B-roll integration, emoji overlays (catching up to Submagic here), better Québécois French detection, multi-cam podcast support. I'll ship them one at a time, based on what users actually ask for via hello@haikuclip.com.

If you want to support this

Three ways:

• Try the product and tell your creator friends — word of mouth is our only marketing budget
• Leave feedback, good or bad, at hello@haikuclip.com — I read every email
• If you're francophone, please tell me when the French output falls short. It's the thing I care most about getting right.