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If you are a video creator, you must utilize captions to maximize the potential of your content.
Captions are simply the textual version of your video. It can contain what the speaker is saying and even their expressions, such as laughter, crying, heavy breathing, etc.
It was introduced mainly for people who are hard of hearing to understand what the video is about. That is a significant benefit in itself. However, if we see it from a marketing point of view, adding captions to your video offers additional benefits. Here are some of them.
Improves SEO and visibility 🔎
If you’re going to upload your videos on platforms like YouTube, adding captions to it will help make your videos more discoverable via search. Their crawlers cannot watch or listen to your videos, but they can index text. By providing captions, you are making it easier for their algorithm to process the transcript.
YouTube automatically converts your videos to text anyway, but it’s not the most accurate all the time. Also, creating captions can be helpful when you want to upload the video outside of YouTube too.
Targets people who prefer reading over watching video đź“–
A recent survey concluded that 47% of people prefer reading over watching videos to learn stuff, especially those aged between 14 and 23. This means, when you add captions to your videos, you’re also targeting the people who prefer reading. It’s like shooting an arrow that hits two targets.
Boosts audience’s attention đź§
Reading the captions while watching the video can make it easier for your audience to understand the content and grasp the message that’s being delivered. This can result in your audience feeling fulfilled with your content.
It makes things convenient đź‘Ť
There are times when we’re in an environment where we cannot play videos with sound on, especially at a library or while traveling. And it’s not always that we carry our earphones/pods with us, so in similar situations, having captions can help understand the video.
Now, let’s have a look at some of the solutions that’ll help you generate captions from your video.
Happy Scribe
I had to mention Happy Scribe first because it’s such a fantastic tool trusted by over 100,000 users worldwide, including BBC, Forbes, and Spotify.
This tool takes your video and extracts the speech from it to create captions in more than 120 different languages. And all of this within a few minutes of wait-time! Apart from English, some of the many languages include Finnish, German, Zulu, Vietnamese, and Arabic. It also catches on the dialects and accents to transcribe them accurately.
All you have to do is upload your video, choose your desired language and finally select “Machine Generated” to have your captions ready in a jiffy. You can then export it to different available formats.
Happy Scribe gives you 85% accuracy, which is pretty good for an automated tool that’s lightning fast as well.
Veed
Another easy-to-use solution to generate captions for videos automatically, Veed takes no more than a few minutes to get the work done.
It can detect over 100 languages along with accents and transcribe them accurately, all thanks to its cutting-edge AI technology.
This online tool can add captions to your videos in just one click without downloading any complex software. Before you export the result, you can make changes like changing style, size, font, and other corrections if needed.
Veed has three different export format options, which are TXT, VTT, and SRT. You can use them depending upon what you want to do with the captions. For instance, if you’re going to save the captions to add to the video, later on, you can do that using the TXT file format. In contrast, the VTT and SRT are proper subtitle formats and great for saving ready-to-go files.
Another very cool feature of this solution is the ability to translate your captions once it is generated. So, if you feel the final result should be available in more than one language, you can translate it to as many different languages as you want.
Kapwing
Free to get started and with no watermarks, Kapwing allows you to directly add subtitles to your videos, no matter the format or the size.
It has an easy-to-use interface and is entirely browser-based, which means you can do everything online without having to download anything on your computer.
Kapwing can be suitable for videos you want to upload on YouTube or even social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
You can start by uploading the video file or pasting the link on the box to load the video on the server. You can then use the easy subtitle tool to time the captions to the correct position in your video.
Since this tool is automated, it automatically generates the captions, but before exporting the result, you can edit it to ensure it’s completely accurate. You can change the font, text size, color, and position of the captions. It also allows you to play around with additional elements, such as adding a background to the subtitles, trimming your video to fit the text, etc.
Once you are happy, you can hit “Create,” and your video will process instantly. On a side note, if you already have an SRT file, you can import it into this tool, and it’ll add it to your video and do the rest of the work.
Clideo
Another free tool to add captions to your videos, Clideo is super handy when you want something simple but still very accurate.
Their caption maker is entirely online and stores your video for only 24 hours, during which you can export it to wherever you want. It’s also free from annoying ads, which unfortunately can be seen in most of the free tools nowadays (but not with this and the other tools in this list).
Clideo is a manual tool, which means you’d have to play the video and write the captions yourself or import an SRT file. It allows you to time it to perfection, and you can edit them afterward to make it a little fancier by adding background color, changing alignment, font size, position, etc.
It supports all the major video formats for exporting, including MP4, MKV, MOV, and MPEG. A very cool feature is the ability to resize the final videos to fit into different social media requirements, such as for Instagram. It has size presets that you can use right away.
Conclusion 👩‍💻
Adding captions to your videos is highly recommended, especially in this age where the competition is fierce in the digital world. You need to use everything available to help push your videos in front of viewers.
The above tools will get the job done seamlessly with minimal effort from your side.
