Learning how to transcribe video into text can improve accessibility and make content more attractive to search engines. Transcription—which involves putting spoken word, music, or other speech sounds into written or printed form—is an effective video content management strategy that benefits your business and those who watch your videos. Learn how to transcribe video into text and why you might consider using a leading video transcription tool to optimize the process.
Why Should You Learn How To Transcribe Video Into Text?
Video transcriptions are important whether you use videos for marketing, corporate communication, or learning and development. That's because transcribing internal and external communications improves accessibility and lets you engage with people who have hearing or visual disabilities.
Improving video accessibility helps you comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), legislation passed in 1990 that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. By transcribing videos into text, you can ensure everyone has the same access to your content. Creating ADA-compliant videos isn't a legal requirement for businesses in the United States (only for schools and police departments). However, you can use transcriptions to improve viewer comprehension and the overall experience of your audience. Transcriptions can also help people learning English understand your videos.
Another benefit of learning how to transcribe video into text is improved search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines can obtain information from transcribed text, crawl that text for keywords, and boost your search rankings. Research shows that transcriptions can also improve video completion rates by up to 80 percent, according to Business2Community.
Here are some more benefits of video transcriptions:
- Viewers can access transcribed content in environments where it's hard to hear audio, such as noisy airports or restaurants.
- Viewers can watch your content in quiet areas, such as libraries, where sounds would disturb other people.
- Videos with transcriptions can improve learning outcomes. Viewers can read and copy/paste complicated words and reread complex concepts presented in a video.
How To Transcribe Video Into Text
1) Do It Yourself
You might want to transcribe video into text manually. That involves typing spoken words, music lyrics, and any other speech sounds from a video into a text editing tool. You can then add the finished text to the video using a video editing platform.
Manual transcribing involves playing and pausing recordings until you write down or type all the words and sounds in the recording. While this method may be the most cost effective, it can take hours to transcribe a video, and you might make mistakes during the process. You could hire a freelance professional transcriptionist to do the work for you, but you need to find a reputable professional with advanced listening, accuracy, and typing skills.
Viostream allows its users to order human-generated closed captions for videos with 99% accuracy for a small additional fee. These captions comply with WCAG 2.0 AA—the international standard for web accessibility. You can use these captions for your video transcript, enabling more people to enjoy your content. Start your free trial now and learn why you can trust Viostream.
Related Reading: Video Accessibility Checklist: Let Everyone Enjoy Your Content
2) Use Automatic Video Transcripts
If you don't want to learn how to transcribe video into text manually, you can use a tool to generate transcriptions for you automatically. These tools use speech recognition technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to provide viewers with a text version of the audio track in your video. Any computer tool will never be 100% accurate, but you can use an automatic transcript as a "first draft" and correct any mistakes as you go.
Some automated tools are better than others. YouTube's captions feature—which you can use to create a transcript—is only accurate 60-70% of the time, according to a study from the University of Minnesota Duluth. To put it another way, that means one in three words might be wrong.
Viostream integrates with apps that automatically transcribe your video content, removing the need for manual work. These apps transcribe the audio track in videos with a great deal of accuracy and improve the accessibility and searchability of your content.
Related Reading: Why ADA Compliance Videos Matter When Creating Digital Content
In Conclusion
Learning how to transcribe video into text can improve accessibility for viewers and make videos more appealing to search engines. While there's no legal requirement for commercial organizations to transcribe video content, doing so will help you appeal to a broader audience and make your videos more engaging and enjoyable for viewers. You can manually transcribe videos, hire a transcriptionist to do it for you, or use automated tools like those that connect with the Viostream platform.
Viostream is an enterprise-level platform that syncs with third-party transcription apps, helping you learn how to transcribe video into text automatically. Its built-in caption editor lets you correct any mistakes before you publish transcriptions. If you prefer a human touch, you can also work with our WCAG 2.0-compliant transcriptionist for your videos. To find out more, start your free trial now.
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