Benefits Of Closed Captions & How To Automatically Add Them
Compared to their open alternative, closed captions imply text on the screen that can be turned on or off by the user. In popular media, closed captions are more commonly known as subtitles. They can be added to virtually any video content, whether it’s a movie, an interview, an advertisement or even a song. At first glance, closed captions might not seem to be worth the effort of adding them – but in reality, they offer a lot more than you might think.
How Are They Beneficial?
Although video content in itself is a lot more appealing, not everyone has the advantage to watch it at all times. For example, many people like to watch videos during their daily commune and in other public areas. In these cases, loud audio often isn’t allowed and can prevent the viewers from getting the full experience. Captions solve the problem of any missed dialogue, as well as providing an alternative way of consuming content. Also, with more and more videos featuring autoplay on mute, you’ll retain the ability to capture the user’s attention even without any audio.
– Improved Engagement
Studies have shown that viewers are more likely to go through the whole video if there are captions included. They give more context to the video, which can ultimately lead to improved watch times. Facebook stated that, on average, view time is boosted by a whopping 12 percent when captions are involved.
– Bigger Audience
In EU and US only, there are over 70 million people who have some sort of hearing impairment. On a global level, that’s around 5% of the world’s population. This means that without captions, you’re unable to reach almost 400 million people. Subtitles improve your content’s accessibility, which is beneficial not only for the sake of views but also in terms of marketing efforts.
– Better SEO
SEO relies on keywords – when you add text to your videos, Google is able to provide more accurate results and recognize exactly what the theme of your video is. Captions are indexed as any normal text would, giving your website a much larger coverage and increasing your probability to get noticed.
Captioning Videos with Audext
Trying to manually write out all of the dialog (in some cases even environmental sounds) from the videos quickly gets time-consuming. One of the more popular solutions is transcription, but without the right tools or services, it has the potential to be very expensive. Audext audio to text converter was developed in an attempt to combat these inefficient methods and provide an all-in-one solution. regardless of the type of videos that you’re dealing with.
At its core, Audext is a video to text transcription utility that employs some of the latest technological trends in order to provide an accurate, true-to-life textual representation of the corresponding audio. For a caption to be of high quality, it needs to cover three factors – solid accuracy (over 99%), precise speaker labels, and good synchronization with the audio. Audext takes care of all the three aspects right out of the box and even introduces some quality of life features.
The process is simple – upload the video, make any wanted modifications through the built-in editor, and export the final result. Since each piece of the text comes with its appropriate timestamp, you can quickly skip to it to check for any possible errors. The editor itself gives you the ability to find & replace certain phrases, modify the audio’s playback speed as well as some other additional tweaks.
When everything looks exactly how you want it to, Audext gives you the ability to export the file either in .DOC or .TXT format. After that’s finished, there’s still one more thing left to do.
Choosing a Proper Caption Format
Neither of the two included formats are compatible with video captions, which is why you’ll have to use some online utilities to convert them. There are dozens of different formats out there, such as SRT, VTT, SCC, SAMI, and others. Which one you’ll choose depends on the purpose of the video – if it’s going to be uploaded to a video sharing platform such as YouTube, the SCC format is ideal. However, the two standardized variations are SRT and VTT, which are often encountered in movies and media players. If you’re unsure which one to go with, SRT is going to work in 99% of the cases.
