📜 How To Easily Transcribe A YouTube Video

Before I forget, if you're curious about Kajabi, use my affiliate ink here for a free trial. 

Let's talk about a sweet little trick for when you need to transcribe your YouTube videos.

You could hit play and write out everything you've done in a YouTube video.  It takes quite a long time to do it that way. One of the cool things that YouTube has is what's called ‘closed captioning’.  Closed captioning is the words that pop up on the screen.  YouTube is transcribing it for you - just like you see on TV.

You can go in and edit the transcription if the words are little bit wrong.  Sometimes their algorithms aren't exactly right and it doesn't pick up exactly what you're saying.  Or, you could just download all those transcriptions so that when you begin to go write your own transcriptions, you have a file to start with. It's pretty cool. Let me show you how to do it.

The first thing you want to do is go into YouTube and sign in. You'll you know you're signed in if your account at the top right corner shows that you're signed in. In this case, I'm using the Stupid Easy Lasting Freedom account. Next, we're going to go to ‘YouTube Studio’.  YouTube studio is where you're able to edit and look at all the videos you have uploaded and things like.  This is in ‘beta’ area (for now).  Some of you may have the alpha version, but most people have moved over to the beta version. It's just a new format that they've been working on for a while. It's nice and clean. 

Once you're in this format, you're going to pick a video. Let's just pick a video here.  This is a little crash course I had done for some friends.  What I want to do is transcribe this. I want to get the transcription from this. I don't want to have to write out every single word.

First you want to go to ‘Transcriptions’ and tell it what language this should be in. For our purposes, we're going to set our language like this - in this case is “United States English” and hit confirm.  If you had your own transcription you could upload it. We're not going to do that today.  You're going to go to “other features” and then “translations and transcriptions”.  Nice and easy! It's going to show you the video, and it has all kinds of stuff there.  Click where it says English (this is not intuitive by the way!) Click English and pulls up the transcription that it has processed for you. This took me a while to figure out - so if you're watching this video it's probably because you couldn't figure this out either!!

Next, if you want to, you could edit the automatic transcription within YouTube - like if a word was wrong you could do it right here.  Again, that’s not what we're going to do here. We're going to go to “actions” and create and download an SBV. Next, I download it and I take it right into my tray.  Now, I'm using Google Chrome - which is what I advise you to do. I think Google Chrome is the most stable, and has the most amazing extensions. I'm a Mac user, and I love Safari - but Chrome is just way better for many applications.  After you've got the SBV file, it displays it down here in this tray. This is just a temporary area which is really nice so you don't have to go into your downloads folder. Next, we're going to open up a tab and go to this URL (http://transcripter.jeffanddan.com/). I save it in my browser because I don't want to have to type it in every time. I'll also put the link below so you can find it easily. I would bookmark this and favorite it. This is just somebody's website that created this. 

There's probably other ways to do this, but it's a nice little quick website to use and all you have to do is drag the SBV file into this screen. It automatically shows the timestamps for all the different words you said you're in your video. We're going to delete those timestamps by just hitting this button (delete timestamps) and boom! It puts the whole thing in one giant paragraph. Right now, it is a little bit messy – no punctuation, sentence structure or paragraphs.  You're going to have to go through of course and break it up into sentences and paragraphs.  A transcription that is a lot easier than typing from scratch.  There's two other word buttons down there - selections where you can stop words like um and things like that if you didn't want that or it can delete out repetitive words. I find that those don't work as well. I don't trust them - so I don't use them. Next, I go into the text and select ‘all’ and “copy”.  You can click and drag to highlight a section, and copy, or another quick way to do it is if you're on a PC, just hit ‘ctrl’ or hold the control key and hit ‘a’ for all, and then ‘ctrl’ and ‘c’ for copy. If you're on a Mac, hit command ‘a’ and command ‘c’ to select all and copy. Once you copy this text, paste it into a document that you can use - such as in ‘notepad’, Word, or any text editor you want. I use Evernote a lot because I like how it helps me keep track of things.

In the next few videos I'm going to talk about how to implement this transcription into your blog post.

Alright guys - that's it for this week! We will see you on the next video!

- Zion 🌱