It comes down to your accuracy tolerance I find. We have a few levels. Most start with the auto-transcribe that our video storage service performs. If it is a scrap video it stops there. If it is a standard one, someone from the instructional design team usually reviews for typos/inaccuracies and fixes. If its a higher level that will require compliance sign off we go to an agency that basically has a human transcription service and give us a certificate that confirms it is accurate.

Thanks @Bfarkas I’m leaning towards your standard option where you use auto-transcribe and have someone fix any typos/inaccuracies. Now I just need to find the best software for doing the auto-transcribe. We don’t have a video storage service, but I think we may be able to use YouTube to do the auto-transcribe step, and then grab the caption file. If you (or anyone else in the community) has used YouTube or knows of a good auto-transcribe app, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, have done the youtube route before. Most of the services offer to some level at this point. It works, just need a software to read the outputs nicely for the correction step. 

Auto-transcribe in Premiere is pretty good. That’s what I’ve been doing.

I then convert to vtt and bulk-translate with google.

Rev was the cheapest for human captioning I found.

You can transcribe with Amazon cloud solutions for nearly free as well. I found that premiere was same or better quality and timings.

@lrodman Thanks for the info about Premiere Pro. One of my colleagues checked the reviews and it sounds like the accuracy is pretty high as you say. Have you had any feedback from your foreign users about the effectiveness of the closed captions? We’re also considering closed captions as a way to localize our videos.

@Daniel - check out rev.com

I am huge fan of it after knowing IDs were spending time closed captioning with stuff from YouTube. Why get a closed caption that is right 90% of the time when you can stride for 99% to even 100% accuracy with a low cost solution.

They offer a burn in solution for videos (with some control over style) if you don’t want to be bothered needing to insert an .srt file into your publishing software.

I would say that premiere is right 98% of the time and rev 99.9%

Rev is $1.50/min

Depending on how you publish your videos, you can use subtitle files - we use multiple languages so burn-in isn’t an option, and not everyone likes subs. Just my thoughts.

Oh, and foreign users say the subs are great quality. No complaints. Like I said, I wouldn’t do burn-in for multi language. Note you must use VTT not SRT but that’s an easy bulk conversion.

You can actually use SRT - I did it by accident - and it works, but you get random timecode insertions lol.

Thanks all, this is great info!

Hi all,

Just circling back to this thread now we’ve settled on a solution. In the end, we decided to go with Microsoft Stream. All you need to do is upload the video, wait a few minutes while the captions are auto-transcribed, and then download the captions file. It’s free as long as you’re subscribed to Microsoft 365, and as a nice bonus, the file is already saved in vtt format.

Yup, def nice way to go. Depending on level of sensitivities, might want to scan them quickly after…have had some poor word choices added especially for any industry specific jargon. 

Yes, that’s a good point. We check the files and make all the necessary corrections. I would say that the automatic transcription is about 99% accurate, but that's probably because we use AI voiceovers with very clear pronunciation. I haven't tested how accurate it is with a human voice.

Wait….are the AI voiceovers working from scripts?

Yes!

I have to look but there’s totally matching tools that can generate the vtt file 100% accurate, you insert video and script and it just matched the times, then no manual review needed. 

Wow, I didn’t know that. Please let me know what you find!

@Bfarkas Hi.  looking at this older post.  we use AI voiceover as well, did you find any tools that you would recommend.  We use the audio file in our video editor, so it gets broken up.  This negates the ability to download the transcript form the AI tool.    Would love to know if there’s something that works with bot the video and script.  Thanks!