You may have already got the news: in August 2020, Youtube announced that it would end the community captioning service.
As of September 28, 2020, users will no longer be able to ask for help when creating and translating subtitles for their international audience.
If Youtube argued that a very minority use this feature (0.2% of the creators), this decision deprived us of a valuable and effective subtitling solution.
This leaves us with either completely manual subtitling or an automatic transcription solution, the Youtube solution, which, incidentally, is not without flaws.
So what can we do?
At Checksub, we got a few ideas to still save time in the production of your video ;) .
Collaborative captions: calling in a professional
The essential benefit of Youtube's community feature was to provide clear and accurate subtitles for all languages since they were optimized by other users. While the service was not without flaws (spam, trolls, and human errors), it had the merit of being efficient and creating truly collaborative value.
If we want to keep these benefits of human optimization, the first alternatives that present themselves on the Internet are subtitling and translation services.
These services provide you with external partners to work on your project. You can find many offers on the market, but the ones that work best have proven expertise and collaborators.
I am thinking for example of 2m.com.au or Authot.com which are reliable and full professional transcription services.
Even further, there are also platforms that allow you to hire freelancers and subtitling agencies to take care of your projects. For example, Checksub can put you in touch with an agency to help you.
Alternatively, there are recognized brands such as Rev.com, Upwork.com, or Go.transcript that easily connect you with quality freelancers around the world.
Which automatic subtitling software to choose for its Youtube subtitles?
If you still want to rely on the efficiency of an automated solution, the Youtube speech recognition technology can obviously still do the job.
Yet, for large-scale subtitling projects, you have to admit that there are much more productive and complete tools to take care of it on the Internet.
The difference between these online solutions is that they have better technology than Youtube and a workflow more adapted to video professionals and even individuals in general.
They have a platform on which you can collaborate, offer a large number of different languages and settings, and you can easily transfer different file formats, and encode your subtitles.
We can mention here HappyScribe.com, Amberscript.com, and of course Checksub.com our solution. Let me tell you a little bit more about the differentiating value of our automatic subtitling tool.
Youtube Collaborative subtitles: using Checksub
At Checksub, we're not going to lie to you, we've been working for 4 years on a solution that puts the value of collaboration at the heart of subtitling.
We first started to create a tool adapted to the needs of video creators:
- One of the best speech recognition and machine translation APIs to analyze your video.
- An easy-to-use online transcription editor
We then tried to optimize our platform through collaborative features on projects and the possibility of professional intervention if needed.
The approach is quite simple:
- Create a project and upload your video
- Indicate the original language and the languages you wish to obtain (there are 128 languages in all).
- Check the result and share the link with your collaborators to contribute. If you encounter some difficulties, you can contact a professional to help you.
- Export the written transcription file and do whatever you want with it.
For some time now, we've also had the idea of going even further by adding new collaboration features. Within 1 or 2 weeks, you will be able to ask your Youtube community to intervene in your subtitles and bring their skills.
You'll just need to share a link and your audience will be able to directly improve the accessibility of your content.
We'll keep you in touch with that. For the moment, we'll let you test our most recent version!
