If you are the owner of a video, Youtube lets you do two things with respect to captioning.

Automatic Captioning: Basically, you don’t have to do anything to add captions to your videos. Under “CC” (at the bottom of the player), you will find an option called “Transcribe Audio”. If clicked, Youtube  automatically uses its speech to text algorithm and starts showing captions at the bottom of the screen. This is the same algorithm that is used by Google Voice. The captioning is pretty decent, but not accurate. Still, it does a fantastic job of creating automatic captions from just the audio speech available in the video. 

Note: As of now, only “participating channels” have access to this feature, but hopefully it will be released to all uploaders soon. To check if this feature is available to you, go to your uploaded videos, and under one of your videos click “Insights”, and choose “Captions and Subtitles”. If you see “English: Machine Transcription” under “Available Caption Tracks” then Automatic Captioning would work on your video.

Another note: It seems like Automatic Captioning works really well on videos with clear audio.

Check out this video. The audio in this video is very crisp and clear, and the people in this video are speaking at what seems to be the average rate of speech.

Here’s another video that I made around an year ago with a friend. My friend’s rate of speech is average too, but the audio does not seem to be very crisp and clear (the audio was captured using just the phone mic). Needless to say, Automatic Captioning on this video is pretty much terrible.

Automatic Timing: If you want to use your own transcripts, Youtube allows you to add transcripts in a very simple text format, and automatically detects when the words are spoken. There is absolutely no need to add time codes (unlike the SubViewer transcript files that require time codes in front of every sentence in the file, making the entire process very cumbersome). The transcript file would be a simple text file that has all the dialogs from the video.

This feature is available to all video uploaders.

Please watch this video to learn more about Automatic Captioning and Automatic Timing: