Video Transcription Using YouTube
Having recently embarked on a small project to highlight Business and Community Engagement activities across UK further and higher education I had the opportunity to carry out some video work. Something that I’ve always found a little tedious is the development of video captions and/or transcripts. I generally tend to make a transcript available when publishing video and make it as appealing as possible e.g. Example Transcript (PDF, 24KB ).
Having heard of the new facility available on YouTube I was quite pessimistic as to how well it would work. How wrong I could be! Saving my transcript as a simple .txt file (using Notepad) and uploading it alongside the video created the following.
I was amazed to see that individual words were automatically aligned to speech within the video. I’ve generally made a slight mistake with some of the videos from our channel in providing some lead in text however the transcript catches up with the speech and works out exactly where it should be. In the video above the transcript works itself out at about the 30 second mark. Needless to say I was very impressed.
The hard part now is the actual transcription itself however there are a host of services that can do this for you relatively cheap that a simple search will reveal.
