Transcribing Videos By Hand Vs. Automated Transcription Tools

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In this video, our friend Dave Dugdale compares the time it took him to transcribe a typical three minute video by hand verses using an automatic transcription service. As you likely know, automated transcription services use speech-to-text recognition technologies that at this point, are no where near 100% accurate. But does using an automated transcription service save you time, even when you may need to make corrections?

For those of you who may be unaware, there are a few tools available to provide transcriptions and closed captions for your video files.  As we've written about in the past, providing closed captions and transcripts are a great way to add rich on-page text for your video landing pages which is a good practice for video SEO.  Additionally and arguably more important, using transcriptions and closed captions help with accessibility. 

Also, you can take these transcripts and upload them to your YouTube account as YouTube will then use Google's speech-to-text recognition technologies to transform your plain text transcript into closed captions for your YouTube video.  There are some indications (which I will cover in a post to come) that YouTube is using these closed captions to help better understand video content - which makes perfect sense.

SubPly, is a service that provides free automatic transcription and closed captioning for videos.  Despite Dave's experience that only Blip.tv files were accepted, I believe that the issue is more so related to the fact that SubPly only accepts FLV files at this time.  Unfortunately, they can not do mp4s.  Additionally, the free service is only available for videos that are less than 5 minutes in duration.  That being said, they do have professional products and services as well as an API for those who need transcription, closed captioning and/or translation for their online videos.  They have also partnered with several online video platforms like Brightcove to provide these services.

About our Guest:
This guest post was produced by Dave Dugdale the owner of SolarDave.com and RentVine.com. He has produced over 200 videos for his solar and rental sites after he got his first HD camera 3 years ago. Dave has also been leading the way in better detection of rental scams by sharing his database of blacklist email addresses with his competitors.

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