What you should know about YouTube auto closed captions(CC)
Studies consistently show that adding captions increase viewership time, boost SEO, and help with accessibility. All of which can boost channel likes and earn you more dollars, if you want to do video marketing for your channel.
So if you are going to do it – and you should – it is worth doing it right.
Whilst it is tempting to go the cheap and instant route by using YouTube’s automatic captioning service, there are some limitations to this service to consider.
Let’s look at why you shouldn’t be using YouTube’s automatic captioning service and what you should be using instead.
YouTube Auto Caption is not always available
Maybe you do not believe it, but automatic captioning isn’t always available on YouTube indeed. In fact, over half of the videos aren’t able to be automatically captioned by YouTube.
Do you know the reasons?
YouTube has listed the reasons on their support document. Under these circumstances, YouTube auto caption is not available.
- The captions aren’t available yet due to processing complex audio in the video.
- Automatic captions don’t support the language in the video.
- The video is too long.
- The video has poor sound quality or YouTube doesn’t recognize the speech.
- There’s a long period of silence at the beginning of the video.
- There are multiple speakers whose speech overlaps.
That’s a long list of reasons why YouTube auto caption may not work for your video!
(Reference: Google Support)
Limited languages can Auto Caption
Another reason why auto-captioning may not be available is that the language in your video maybe cannot be supported by YouTube’s automatic captioning yet.
In fact, YouTube can only auto caption within limited languages currently: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
So what if your video is in Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Greek, or Vietnamese? Well, you will have to find another solution.
Considering that over 80% of YouTube users come from outside of the United States, we find this list of 10 languages quite limiting.
Service is not available all the time
Even if your video has excellent sound quality, isn’t too long, and is trimmed so there isn’t any silence at the beginning, it still doesn’t mean that the automatic captions will be available.
Since the beginning of the year, multiple users have been reporting issues with automatic captioning working on their YouTube channel.
If you are running a YouTube Channel as a business, this can be very frustrating as well as a costly time delay.
Automatic Captions will not always be available
One of the main reasons to include captions is to increase your SEO. Google can’t scroll through the audio in video content. Therefore, to be indexed, it needs text. Adding captions to your video can provide this text.
However, Google will not always index YouTube videos that have automated captions. The reason for this is that automatic captioning is often too poor.
Thus, for your video to be indexed on Google you will need to upload the captions yourself either by attaching an SRT file or manually transcribing the video yourself.
Is there any Alternative?
It is widely known that YouTube auto captions is free. However, it isn’t the most effective, or necessarily the quickest method. YouTube’s built in feature doesn’t always work, there are limited languages that it can transcribe, the service isn’t reliable, and the captions aren’t always indexed by Google.
By instead, if you try Autosubtitle.Online, you will obtain a free trial service, the professional speech to text tech, a quick and cost-effectively subtitle online tool.
Autosubtitle Online accepts more than 30 languages to transcribe; and it supports free translation; it can enhance the transcription quality by using Autosubtitle specilized noise reduction technology…
Downloading the subtitled videos or exporting the single SRT files are both good choice for Youtuber’s video SEO.
If you have any questions about transcribing your video, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
