Are you a content creator? Or Are you a court reporter looking for an easy way to caption lots of content? This blog post might be for you.
Having captions is very useful these days. Its really good for engagement, and its also really good for accessibility - specifically hearing impaired folk.
However, and there is no getting around this, it is painful to do.
Manual audio or video transcription takes ages. For a transcription professional it takes about 4x - so for a 15 minute video it takes 1 hour to transcribe.
But this is only really true when the complexity of the content is low or the transcriber has a high degree of familiarity with the content.
What Is The Best Subtitling Software?
It depends. Sorry. There is no simple answer.
Actually - its video translator - our product is the best subtitling software! Ok it probably isn’t, but it might be 😃
The answer depends on a number of factors. Lets talk about them one by one.
Budget - Free AI Transcription Software
Free software exists such as the Google AI suite but you would not be here if that worked for you. Basically the answer varies with how much money you are willing to spend.
The bottom line - a hybrid solution of AI with human post-editing is rapidly becoming the preferred choice - but who does the post editing, how secure is it, and what kind of accuracy can you expect?
Btw - here is a blog post about the kind of security concerns with online transcription.
Like I said - budget.
So your options are:
- (1) manually transcribing with subject matter expert (really good + really expensive)
- (2) AI transcribing with human input (cheap but uncertain quality)
- (3) AI transcribing + your own people post-editing (cheap + really good but your own staff time)
Video translator (thats us!) is a option (3) play.
We think using AI + trusted staff or contractors is a really nice mix of both worlds. That way you get to bring your own subject matter experts, and use our tech in a cheap and scalable manner.
Accuracy In AI Transcription - How Good Is AI Transcription Really?
Its pretty good. The thing to understand is that as your content moves up in information complexity, the AI gets worse.
Practically this means that if your content is about gossip - no worries. But given you are probably trying to sell stuff with content marketing this means that important stuff may be incorrect.
Second point. Generally subtitling software uses generic AI. At video translator we use a proprietary language-dialect mapping system to increase accuracy. We have several English, Spanish and Arabic dialects to help out.
AI Accuracy And How To Think About What You Are Paying For…
We wrote an entire post about it - check it out for more details.
Time - How Long Does AI Transcription Take?
With the majority of online transcription and online translation providers turn around time is a factor. Some are very quick.
But what are the chances that someone turning around on a deadline will aim for quality?
Unlikely.
Should you internalize with our AI tools? That is a hard question to answer, but if your value proposition is directly linked to your bottom line - yeah you probably should.
Video Translator is real time AI transcription, real time AI translation and real time AI dubbing. You do the work, when you want to.
What does real time mean - practically seconds to minutes. That is if its a 2 GB file it'll take longer than if its a 20 mb file.
Short files are the quickest (seconds). That being said, you probably want to use short videos because traction numbers show they work better.
- For YouTube ~10 minutes works best
- For LinkedIn average time a video is watched is 7 seconds
Different stuff works differently. Optimize for your preferred social channels.
SEO - How To Optimize For SEO In Video
Some simple rules. Use titles, descriptions, tags and other metadata options - very important!
This is the secret to why people use video translator - easily translating titles and descriptions gives you multi lingual SEO.
An ability to market to the billions of people who don't speak English!
Want to market to China! What about India! The Middle East? Grow Your Audience
Using WebVtt For SEO
Is this really a factor in deciding what subtitling software to use? It is the MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR EVAH!
Depending on your platform you may really really want to use WebVTT. Read more here but a simple way to think about it is so.
WebVTT allows search engines to understand what your video is all about. It makes your content indexable, and therefore search worth!
Boom!
From the CSS-Tricks website here are two images.
Its all about search.
ALL. ABOUT. SEARCH.
Conclusion
We really hope you found this blog post useful, and are able to increase your target audience using our technology.
Please connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook for any comments, questions, or just to keep up to date with the work we do!
We are very grateful for your support!
If you are interested in trying out our technology, please try our platform or drop us an email at hello@videotranslator.ai.
