I learned about the automatic closed captioning tool that has been added to Youtube and I wanted to try it out for myself. If you have uploaded any videos to Youtube and they have narration then this may work for you. The folks at Google/Youtube have a pretty good audio to text algorithm working. It is not perfect and it will depend on the quality of your audio, your narrator, and the language in your script. More technical, esoteric, or compound words may not convert as well with the automatic tool. But, it should come pretty close and then you have the ability to quickly edit the text. I can see this working well for short videos but it might be to laborious for longer ones. If it was a longer video I might go another route and upload the script to youtube. But for today, I want to address the automatic captioning for a short video. At this point I am definitely recommending it for short videos that you have uploaded to Youtube. To help you try it out, I’ve written some instructions with screenshots. You can view my directions here. If you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know.
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