Today we're going to give you guys
some simple tips on the easiest way
to create captions for your videos here on YouTube
and how effective are the automated ones
that YouTube creates for you.
That's coming up.
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer
and I'm hanging out here with Tole Khesin
from captionsforyoutube.com, so like the biggest
captions expert I know.
So thanks for hanging out with us
man and helping us out a little bit.
Thanks, Tim.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, great to have you.
So how accurate-- well, we already
know they're not accurate.
Those automated captions are, like, they're
terrible, almost hilariously so.
But how effective are they?
Are they worth anything?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So we understand speech recognition technology
pretty well because we use it as well.
The difference is that we also have
professional transcriptionists who clean up
the mistakes left behind by the computer.
Typically speech recognition produces about 60% to 70%
accuracy.
So what that means is that one out of every three words
is wrong.
And the thing about speech recognition,
like a lot of people have seen, is that when it's wrong,
it's wrong spectacularly.
Yes.
It makes for very funny videos if you
go back and read some of those.
Exactly.
And so because of the inherent limitations
of speech technology, auto captions
don't get indexed by Google.
And they don't get indexed by YouTube.
And therefore you don't get any help.
You don't get any benefit in terms of viewership or SEO
through the auto captions.
So we talked about last week for you guys who
were watching this, I'll put a link in the description text
below to our video where we talked about some
of the benefits of adding captions to your videos.
So we already talked about that.
So go that check that out.
Link is below.
But assuming that people, Tole, that they have already
kind of figured out, yes, these are valuable for my content,
they meet the goals that I'm trying to meet here
on YouTube, what are some of the best ways and cost-effective
ways to get very accurate transcripts
and captions for your videos?
Sure.
So a lot of this sort of depends on how much content you have.
If your video collection totals 5 or 10 minutes,
I would just do it myself.
Open up a Microsoft Word document or whatever and type
out the spoken words.
It'll probably take you about 5 to 10 times
the duration of the video.
But if you only have ten minutes to transcribe,
that might take you an hour or two, not a big deal.
Once you have those transcripts, you
can just upload them to YouTube, and YouTube will automatically
sync them with the video and create the captions for you.
So that's a really neat feature that YouTube has built in.
Now, if you have more video content,
it's helpful to use some captioning software which
really streamlines the process.
A few of the DIY options that are pretty popular
are CaptionTube, Subtitle Horse, YouTube Subtitler.
And also Magpie is an open-source software
that's really popular.
And also one other tool that's worth noting
is there's a free caption converter by 3Play Media.
So that will allow you to convert and create
all kinds of different caption formats to how
you're going to be using them.
If you guys are watching this, I'll
try to grab the links to all those
and put them below in case people
want to check some of those out.
Awesome.
I haven't heard some of those before.
Yeah.
And then I guess the third option
is to outsource it to a company that specializes
in captioning and transcription.
I'm sorry for the plug, but this is basically where we come in.
Captionsforyoutube is a site that
just makes the process of captioning
videos as easy as possible.
Yeah.
I actually just started using you guys-- well,
not just started.
I've used them a little bit ago.
Then I just picked up and started using you guys again.
And the way I used to do it is I would actually just
go into the captions tools inside YouTube.
And it has some features in there, as you know,
where you start typing.
It puts the video on pause while you type what you hear.
And then as soon as you stop typing,
it detects that and automatically
keeps playing the video.
And then as soon as you start typing--
so it makes it kind of easy just to sit there
and type, crank right through it.
But even that, as awesome as it sounds,
is still very time-consuming.
And for someone like me who's like-- you know,
I'm cranking out, personally, not just here on Video
Creators, but other channels that I'm part of as well, maybe
about seven videos a week.
Like, I can't sit there and caption all those videos.
So you guys have definitely streamlined a stream like that.
So can you give us a quick overview of how that works?
Yeah.
So basically you just log in with your YouTube account.
It'll pull up all your videos.
You select which ones you want to have captioned.
You hit the Go button.
You put in your credit card.
And then that's it.
YouTube sends us those videos.
We create the captions.
We send them back to YouTube.
And the captions just show up.
Yeah, it's super easy.
And it's as simple as that.
You can specify the turnaround.
You can even have it back same day if you want.
And those captions are at least 99%
accurate because they're done by professionally trained
transcriptionists.
Sweet.
The work flow is completely automated.
So you don't even need to upload the captions
or anything like that.
It's all done for you.
If you do want to check out the service captionsforyoutube.com,
we have a promo code you guys can use.
You get 10 minutes for free.
It is creators10.
So creators with an S and the number 10.
So go check that out, and it'll give you 10 free minutes.
You can use it and see what you think about it.
So thanks, man.
Thanks for hanging out with us, Tole.
Thanks, Tim.
The rest of you guys who are watching this,
we'd love to hear what other sorts of methods or tools
that you guys have used that you found
very effective and accurate and affordable
and all that type of stuff.
Comment with those below.
And if this is something that the rest of you guys
are interested in, go check out the links
that I have in the description text of this video for some
of the things that Tole mentioned.
Also check out those comments, and you'll
find plenty of valuable things there, I'm sure.
And if this is your first time here,
we'd love to have you subscribe.
Every week we do tips just like this
to help you guys out as creators.
Tomorrow we do some YouTube Q&A. And then on Tuesdays, we
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and how this platform's always changing it seems.
So you want to keep up with those as creators
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Subscribe if this is your first time here.
And I'll see you guys again tomorrow.
Bye.