Paid captioning services like Otter.ai are nice, but if you don’t have access to another captioning resource, YouTube Studio can be used to auto-caption a video for free.
Steps to upload a video to YouTube Studio for free auto-captioning:
- Go to your YouTube channel in YouTube Studio: https://studio.youtube.com/channel/
- Click ‘Create > Upload Videos’ and choose the video(s) you want to upload with ‘Select Files’.
- After it has been processed, choose the video you want to obtain captions from, from your list of videos.
- Scroll down, find the Subtitles link, and click on it.
- You’ll see ‘English (Automatic)’ for the automated captions track.
Here is some info about how to download your captions from YouTube:
- Copy the Share URL for your video.
- Go to a service like DVDVideoSoft’s Online YouTube subtitles downloader and paste in the video’s URL.
- Choose ‘Original Timestamps’ from the options menu and then click on the ‘SRT’ download button.
Now you have a captions file to go along with your .mp4 video. You can upload the .srt file to other video hosting like MediaSite. Find your subtitles.srt file in your Downloads folder and edit it for accuracy in a text editor. Now you are able to use it in another video hosting service like MediaSite.
Video about obtaining captions from YouTube Studio:
Here are some other resources related to obtaining captions from YouTube Studio:
- See the How to Download YouTube Subtitles for Transcripts of Your Favorite Tutorials 2021 article from LifeHacker for more about obtaining captions or transcripts from YouTube.
- Edit or remove captions in YouTube Studio – a support article from Google related to editing captions.
- Captioning your Presentation – provides information about an automated captioner available in MediaSite that you may have access to.