Turning On YouTube’s Machine Transcription
Hello. My name is Abe Erickson and I am with Ugly Chair Productions, a digital video production company located in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
For this week’s member tip, I want to tell you about turning on machine transcription for your YouTube videos and why it is beneficial.
So, what is “machine transcription”? Machine Transcription uses Google Voice technology to create a transcript with time codes of the spoken word portions of your videos on YouTube and saves it as a text file with the video. When you upload a video to YouTube, machine transcription will automatically create a transcript of your video, so long as the audio is clear. the clearer the audio, the more accurate the transcription.
There are two reasons to turn on machine transcription. First, the transcription is used to create closed-captions that can be turned on or off, depending on the preference of the viewer. Second, since the transcription is a text file associated with the YouTube video, the transcription is indexed by the search engine bots, which affects search engine rankings for your content. So, make sure your script is keyword-rich from your web presence strategy.
To turn on machine transcription,
- Login to your YouTube channel
- Click on “My Videos”
- Identify the video
- Click “Edit”
- Select the “Captions and Subtitles” tab
- Check the box for “English: Machine Transcription” (This option may not be immediately available.)
YouTube also gives you the option to download the transcript and review it for errors. Once the edits have been made, you can upload the transcript by clicking “Add New Captions or Transcript”.
Now your videos have closed-captions and can be indexed by the search engines, having a positive impact on your organic search engine rankings.
Posted on May 10, 2011, in Video SEO, YouTube and tagged Closed-Captions, Video SEO, Video Transcripts, YouTube Videos. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
I would like to know that some of the channels have “machine transcription failed” tag. So can a machine transcription file downloaded from one channel be uploaded to another channel after editing it? What all has to edited as the file shows all junk stuff as there is only music playing in the background?
Yes, some channels may have a “machine transcription failed” error. This is most likely because there was no clear audio for the machine transcription to do its work. You can upload a transcription file to any video. I have not tested, however, to see if YouTube will accept a transcript if it does not match with the audio. My guess is that it will, and again, I am guessing. The reason why I say that is because if you have a video that only has music playing in the background, but you want to add some “closed-caption” text to support what is in the video (even though there is no spoken word audio), you should be able to do that. YouTube wouldn’t know the difference.
Thanks for your response…and one thing would you clarify…
While editing the machine transcription do we have to make changes in the time durations displayed in the transcription file or leave it as it is.
Thanks in advance for your reply
Thank you for participating on the Web Video 4 Business Blog. We have a lot of exciting announcements coming out in the next few weeks. So stay tuned for that.
As for the time code in the transcript, I would recommend leaving them as is and just correct the text for that time code.
However, if you only have music and you want to add text to support what is happening in the video, then you can choose where to have text appear according to the time code. Just note, however, that closed-captioning must be turned on by the viewer. If you want text to always appear as part of the video, then you should add text during the editing phase and not as a transcript in YouTube. But, don’t omit the transcript from your YouTube video. You still want the transcript there for search engine optimization purposes.
I have some videos that have machine translation and I’ve downloaded the file. My intention would be to use the translation text within our blog posts that contain the embedded video.
Do you have any tips on how to get a version of the translated text into a simple text editor (while ignoring the time codes)?
Or would this be a manual editing process of the Excel file?
Hey Adam, thank you for your question and welcome to Web Video 4 Business.
When you are in the “Captions and Subtitles” tab for your video and you click the “Download” button next to “English: Machine Transcription”, your computer will download a file called “captions.svb.txt”. This file can be opened in any text editor. Unfortunately, there is no option that allows you to download the transcript without the timecode. You will have to manually delete the timecodes from either the text editor or in Excel. This is OK, since you will have to format the text anyways so that you can use it in your blog post.
Send me the links to your videos. I’d like to see what you’re doing with web videos.
Thanks for the reply, that’s what I thought. I suppose I could remove those time codes pretty quickly in Excel either manually, or with a formula.
Most of our tutorial videos are behind our member area, but we are starting a small video marketing push. You can see an example of that here:
http://wpprobusiness.com/3400/cheap-online-business-marketing-techniques/
If I come up with a formula, or even a web-based script to strip these time codes, I’ll be sure to let you know.
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