In recent years, podcasts have become a great way for creators and companies to engage discussions with their community. Whether through business, lifestyle, or marketing-related podcasts, they can become leaders in their field, and build a loyal audience.
While podcasts are mainly audio, listeners increasingly favor more and more videos which improve their experience. Adding captions or transcripts help even more with that, increasing podcasts' overall accessibility.
Here we show you how to create subtitles for your podcast videos without wasting too much time.
Why add subtitles to your podcast videos?
It is often said that podcasting is the art of in-depth listening, where two people share their experiences, beliefs and visions on a variety of topics. But creating podcasts is also about bringing a human experience to listeners who seek authenticity and connection.
That's why video podcasts are becoming more and more popular, especially on YouTube (but Spotify has also recently added videos for podcasts). By showing the conversation behind the scenes, viewers can appreciate and understand the speakers' points of view even more.
This is even more true if you caption your podcast content. You make your creations accessible to a rich and varied audience, while improving your brand's visibility. Here are some of the benefits you can expect from subtitles:
- You share your podcasts with a diversity of languages and nationalities around the world.
- Subtitles improve the viewing and engagement rate of your videos, with a stronger visual impact.
- Your listeners can share and interact more easily with your discussions, by being able to quote directly from what you say.
- You enable people who are deaf or hard of hearing to understand your content.
- If you have a site dedicated to your podcast, you improve your video ranking in particular by adding a transcript.
Sounds interesting for you? We show you how to do it.
Podcast captions: the different solutions
Whether you post your podcasts on video platforms (YouTube) or social media, creating subtitles is often the same. What you need is to make an add subtitle file (SRT, VTT). But there are several ways to do this:
- Creating your transcription file manually according to the SRT format. But we warn you it is a rather long and complicated job.
- Using an automatic subtitle generator. Thanks to their voice recognition technology, you will save time and make your work easier.
- Using subtitle experts. If you have a large volume of videos, this is the trusted solution to take charge of your project.
Here we present our professional solution Checksub, which combines automatic technology and professional expertise.
How to use an automatic subtitle generator for your podcasts?
As speech-to-text technologies have become widespread, many automatic subtitle solutions have emerged on the market. By transcription, audio/video synchronization and even foreign language translation, they create a fast and quality result. Among them, our solution is particularly suitable for doing podcast subtitles. It helps you to :
- Automatically and accurately transcribe your videos (advanced voice recognition API)
- Collaborate with professional subtitlers and translators to manage your video project.
- Translate your video into more than 128 languages (translation based on in-depth learning)
- Easily check and customize the appearance of your subtitles
Here is the step-by-step method to use it :
1# Upload your video on the interface
To get started, login to the Checksub platform. By logging in, you will have direct access to the platform to upload your video. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose between several languages to make a translation if necessary.
To try the platform, you have one hour free. If this is not enough, you can buy credits at a low price.
The API will then perform the speech recognition and provide you with the result in a few minutes.
2# Check and optimize the transcription
When the result is ready, you can click on the language of your video and access the dedicated subtitle editor to check and optimize the synchronization.
3# Export your SRT file
When you are satisfied with the result, you can then download the subtitle file. Just press "Export" and then "SRT" to download the file. You can also upload your video with built-in subtitles to export it everywhere effortlessly with the "Export Video" option.
Using a professional subtitling service
As you can see, creating subtitles is quite complex. This is even more true if you have a large volume of podcasts that are difficult to transcribe (ambient noise).
Fortunately, there are also professional services that can take care of your podcast video projects. With the help of proven human expertise, they will deliver your projects in a short period of time and with high quality. For example, our subtitling experts are at your service!
Podcast transcription: the benefits to expect
Another interesting tool, video transcripts generate even more global visibility for your podcasts.
Here are the different benefits you can expect from them:
- You considerably improve your on-page website ranking.
- You provide visual support that your listeners can easily rely on to
- You can turn your podcasts into posts or blog posts
- You allow an audience to access to a quick summary of your podcast.
Here again, it is quite difficult to do the transcription work by yourself. Fortunately, there are many online transcription software packages on the market that will allow you to do it just as well. Checksub can take care of it for example, using the same method as explained above.
We'll let you try everything out. Otherwise, we hope we've helped make your voice heard !
