How to transcribe a video: A step-by-step creator guide

3 ways to transcribe video

Creating a transcript from a video by hand can be a slow process. With the rise of AI, there are now more ways to automate and streamline transcript generation, including new techniques to make accurate transcripts quickly.

Here are three ways you can transcribe videos, along with their benefits and drawbacks, so you can decide the best route for your needs.

1. Manual transcription

In manual transcription, a human transcriber listens to each video file and types out a text transcription by hand. Like a lot of human-powered projects, you’ll sacrifice speed for more accurate text.

Pros

• Greater accuracy: Because humans can decipher more nuanced speech, such as accents, the transcript is more likely to accurately capture the video’s content.
• Additional information: Manual transcribers can add additional content that transcription software might not have the features to generate, such as closed captions for hard-of-hearing viewers and time stamps.

Cons

• Time-consuming: Professional transcribers can keep pace with a video file at normal playback speed, but most people will have to occasionally pause the video to keep up or listen at a slower speed.
• Costly translations: Manually translating a video transcript into multiple languages means you’ll need linguists specialized in each, which requires significantly more time and money.

2. AI-powered automated transcription software

If you opt for a purely automated video-to-transcript workflow, transcribing videos is as easy as selecting a transcription service or app, uploading your video files, and exporting the results. However, there are a few downsides to this method’s ease.

Pros

• Speed: An AI-powered tool can process a video file much faster than any human transcriber could because it catches everything the first time without slowing the playback speed.
• Low cost: While AI-powered subtitle generators and transcription services aren’t cheap, they’re significantly less expensive than paying a human transcriber, especially if you have a lot of videos to transcribe. For example, Vimeo’s AI transcription is available at their lowest paid plan (Starter, $12/month billed annually).

Cons

• Less accurate: AI models are getting better at natural language processing, but they still make mistakes that a human transcriber likely wouldn’t.
• Program constraints: Using software to transcribe videos means you’re limited to whatever features that tool offers. It may not support timestamps and video sections, multiple languages, or live captions, meaning you’ll need to add these manually anyway.

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3. Hybrid methods

Using both AI and manual transcription — such as an AI transcript generator with human edits — gets you the best of both worlds. With this method, you can benefit from the speed and cost savings of AI-powered transcription software and the accuracy and additional information only human translators can provide. 

Pros

• Strong balance: With a hybrid approach, you can stick to your budget and finish your work faster while still ensuring each transcription is as accurate as possible.
• Human expertise: A human transcriber can review an AI-generated transcript to identify instances where the AI has misunderstood something distinctly human, like a laugh or a subtle facial expression. These little details make all the difference in high-quality closed captions. 

Cons

• Diminishing returns: The larger your video library, the less a hybrid model saves you in time and money, because transcribers will still need to review and manage all the files.
• Potential for waste: If a video file has garbled audio or complex text to transcribe, reviewers could spend more time fixing a transcription than they would have spent doing it from scratch.

Tips for accurate audio-to-text transcription

Getting your transcripts right the first time can save you hours of proofreading later. And the more accurate your transcriptions are, the more useful they’ll be for repurposed documents, subtitles, or marketing materials.

Here are a few tips to help you get the most precise transcriptions throughout the process. 

Ensure clear audio quality

Getting accurate audio-to-text transcriptions starts with capturing high-quality audio. When your teams record video content, make sure they’re using quality microphones and recording in a quiet location.

Speak slowly and clearly

Coach the speakers in your videos to speak slowly and enunciate clearly. It helps to be familiar with the script, so guide them through a few vocal warmups and rehearse a few times before recording.

Use noise reduction or audio enhancement

When listening to a video file for transcription, use noise-cancelling headphones and enable audio-enhancing features that boost the speakers’ voices and remove white noise. Some transcription software comes with these abilities, but you can also use audio mixing features that come natively on your OS. For example, on PC, you can enable “Loudness Equalization” to level out spikes in a video’s volume that might distort speech.

Review and edit the transcript after auto-generation

If you opt to use automated transcription software, review the transcripts before you turn them into subtitles or other documents. It takes more time and effort, but it’s well worth it to avoid typos and misheard phrasings slipping through.

Edit your video online with Vimeo →

5 great tools for generating a transcript from video

The quality of your transcriptions depends on how you’re making them, especially if you’ve opted to automate the process. Here are five video transcription tools that can help you create accurate transcriptions quickly.

1. Vimeo

Vimeo’s video transcription tool brings a full-featured approach to transcribing videos. With it, you can automatically generate transcripts, translate them into dozens of languages, and make edits on the fly without taking down and re-uploading the video. You can even use voice cloning to translate the audio track itself for viewers around the world.

The AI transcript generator comes with the Starter paid Vimeo plan, as does subtitle translation, so you don’t need a big budget to start transcribing videos. That makes Vimeo an excellent option for small teams and those who want to try a transcription service but aren’t ready for a big commitment. If you decide to invest in transcript automation, an Advanced plan provides access to AI-generated video summaries, timestamps, and details that can further streamline your video production workflow.

2. Notta

Notta specializes in transcribing videos of team meetings, interviews, and seminars into a searchable document that you can export in several formats, including SRT and PDF. The platform focuses on simplicity, featuring a one-click interface that automatically converts your recordings into a text transcript that everyone can review. There is a free plan that allows you to transcribe up to two hours of video content per month. To increase this limit, you’ll need a Pro or Business plan.

3. Otter.ai

Otter.ai is an AI meeting agent that covers more than typical transcription services. Not only does it transcribe speech to text, but it also summarizes the text into surface-level action items and generates summaries. These features also mean Otter can become an automated assistant you can query to get fast answers about anything it’s transcribed. While Otter’s narrow focus on meetings means it’s less versatile than other options, it’s comprehensive for this use.

4. ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs offers a whole platform of AI tools that can generate, translate, and transcribe speech. They offer demos on their landing page where you can get some free video-to-text transcriptions, but only for very small files. You’ll need an expensive Pro subscription to transcribe more than five hours of video per month. Their API has a much more generous time limit than other AI transcription tools, but setup and maintenance can be time-consuming.

5. Riverside

Riverside is a studio-quality audio tool specializing in podcasts and marketing content. You can transcribe up to two hours of video to text for free with Riverside, but the video you export will bear their watermark. To extend that limit, remove the watermark, and get more AI-powered features, you’ll need a Pro subscription. Higher subscription tiers are tailored to podcasters and marketing teams, featuring options such as multistreaming and presentation recordings.

FAQ

How can I transcribe a YouTube video?

To transcribe a YouTube video, open it in your YouTube Studio account. Then, enable subtitles for your chosen video and select “Edit” in the subtitle field. A modal window that you can type in as the video plays will pop up. To make transcribing your videos a little easier (but slower), enable the “Pause while typing” option.

How long does a podcast or interview take to transcribe?

It depends on how long the podcast or interview runs. Professional transcribers can keep up with videos as they play at the recorded speed. Some people with that much expertise can even transcribe a podcast or interview in less time than it takes to play it normally, especially if they have a template to work off of. 

AI services generate video transcripts much faster than humans because they can accelerate playback even further without missing as much content as a person would. An AI transcription tool might process an hour of video content in 30 minutes or less, for example.

Can ChatGPT transcribe a video?

ChatGPT is not capable of directly transcribing a video file by itself, as it is a language model specifically designed for text processing rather than audio or video input. To transcribe a video, you must first utilize a dedicated Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tool, such as OpenAI's Whisper or another transcription service, to extract the raw text from the audio track of the video. After obtaining that raw text, you can then input it into ChatGPT and ask it to carry out various refinement tasks, such as adding punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, speaker labels, translating, summarizing, or formatting the transcript for different purposes.

How do I ensure data security when using transcription services?

To guarantee data security when using transcription services, it's crucial to perform comprehensive due diligence, concentrating on the provider's technical and contractual protections. Key actions involve confirming that the service implements end-to-end encryption for files both during transmission (while uploading or downloading) and when stored (on their servers). Additionally, you should seek evidence of compliance with important regulations such as HIPAA for medical information or GDPR/SOC 2 for other sensitive data, which indicates a dedication to strong security measures. Moreover, always insist that the service and its transcribers sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), clarify if your data will be utilized for training AI models, and verify that they enforce strict access controls, including unique logins and role-based permissions, to ensure that only authorized individuals manage your confidential files.

Create the best transcriptions with Vimeo

Making the best video transcriptions is all about maximizing automation and minimizing errors, so you can make your videos more accessible while saving some time. 

Vimeo offers a reliable automatic video transcription service as part of the online video editor. You can create the best subtitles for your viewers and marketing material documents for your colleagues while you’re working on other things. With transcript navigation tools to make edits faster and automatic caption creation, Vimeo’s efficient AI tools make transcribing your whole library of video content easy.