Transcription Services for your YouTube Videos

by | Jul 5, 2017 | Blog, Tools

typewriter image - transcription service

Transcribing and adding closed captions to YouTube videos can be helpful for a number of reasons:

  1. Views from people watching with the sound turned off
  2. Views from people who are hard of hearing
  3. Views from people speaking your language as a second language
  4. Search Engine Optimization.

There are options to turn your videos into text.

For every video you upload to YouTube, Google tries to create closed captions. And these are relatively good at this point. But they are missing capitalization (mostly) and punctuation. And Google doesn’t use these for SEO. Here are 4 ways to get the proper text for your video:

  1. Edit Google’s Closed Captions. This usually takes me about 2 minutes for every minute of finished video.
  2. Use the YouTube tool to manually transcribe your video. This usually takes me about 5 minutes per minute of finished video.
  3. Use a paid computerized transcription service like Trint.com. This is better than the free Google service, but still needs a good proofreading before making it public. Trint costs about 25 cents per minute, and you must buy $15 worth of service at a time (to be used over one year.) Trint usually gets the capitalization and punctuation right, but not all the words are correct.
  4. Use a paid human transcription service like Rev.com. In my experience this results in 99% correct transcripts. This is my service of choice. Rev.com costs $1 per minute of footage and they complete your transcripts within 12 hours – usually much faster.

With Rev.com and Trint.com, you can request multiple file types with no additional cost. So you might want a transcript for your Blog and a SRT file for adding closed captions.

Removing that pesky timecode

If you didn’t get a text transcript with your order, or you used the YouTube tool to caption your videos, you’re going to have the timecode inside your file. And removing that can be time consuming if you are just using the mouse and delete key.

Image of SRT and TXT formatting

But this website will do it free. You’ll need to get the captions into YouTube, then cut and paste the video URL into this website. It will remove all that timecode and make one big paragraph.