How to transcribe YouTube video to text

YouTube started in 2005 as a video sharing platform of home made videos. Meaning, regular people like you and me would post home made videos about parties, our cats, dogs, and all sorts of exotic other pets.

But, in the last decade, YouTube has seen at least two trends that are still wide spread today. And these two are YouTube tutorials, i.e. educational videos, and YouTube podcasts, i.e. videos where people get together and discuss various themes.

More often than not, these two types of YouTube videos are made on the spot, i.e. without a transcript. Since the platform is evolving every day, and more and more video content is added, no wonder more and more people search ways of transcribing these videos. As to why they do so, usually people want to search into the conversation, or the tutorial, they want to know something from the video, and they want to know where and when it was said. Either that, or they are interested into adding subtitle to their videos.

And this is where the Vatis Tech speech-to-text technology can come to help. In this tutorial we will show you how to automatically transcribe a YouTube video. What you do with that transcript, is up to you, we're going to show you as a bonus on how to add it to the YouTube video as subtitles.

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A few details before we get started

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To automatically transcribe a YouTube video to text there are a few steps:

1. Download the video from YouTube
2. Upload it to Vatis Tech
3. (Bonus) Edit the text transcript
4. (Bonus) Download the text transcript for YouTube subtitles
5. (Bonus) Upload the transcript subtitles to YouTube

The last three steps are optional, and they show you how to add the transcript as subtitles to your YouTube video.

1. Download the video from YouTube

Downloading the video as the owner

If you are the owner of the YouTube video and you do not have it anymore on your computer, you can download it by following these steps:

1. Sign in your YouTube account, and go to YouTube Studio.
           - You can also get to the YouTube Studio, by pressing on your user icon, then in the menu that drops down, press on the YouTube Studio link.
2. After you've arrived in the YouTube Studio, you will have a navigation menu, a panel, on the left.
   Press on the Content button link.
3. Search for the video you want to transcribe.
4. Hover it, and press on the options menu (a button with three dots ︙).
5. On the menu that opens, press on the Download button link.

There you have it, you have downloaded your video.

A few notes about this. You cannot download your video if:

• It has been removed from YouTube
• It has a copyright or Community Guidelines strike against it
• It uses an audio track from YouTube's Audio Library.
• It was already downloaded 5 times in the last 24 hours (you will have to wait 24 hours to download it again)

Downloading the video as YouTube user

We highly discourage this.

If you are not the owner of the YouTube video, than you might download it using a third party plugin, but you should know that most of third party plugins are breaking the YouTube license. Anyhow, if you download it using a third party plugin, you should make sure that the video is at least licensed as Creative Commons.

Please note that if you are not the owner of the YouTube video, you could ask its owner to give it to you, or at least give permission to use a third party plugin to download. If you get the permission to download it yourself, you would still break YouTube's licenses.

2. Upload the YouTube video to Vatis Tech

This is pretty straight forward. Before we begin, if you want a more in-depth tutorial on uploading files to use Vatis Tech's automated speech-to-text technology, please refer to this blog post.

1. Sing in to your Vatis Tech account.
2. If you are not automatically redirected, go to your account's files listing.
3. Press the green New file button link.
4. On the modal that opens, select the YouTube video you have previously downloaded.
           - you can select multiple files.
5. Select the language of the YouTube video.
6. Select the model of the automated speech-to-text technology
           - we recommend using the General one.
7. Select your preferred options
           - once again, if you want to better understand the options, please refer to the in-depth blog post.
8. And that is it, the Vatis Tech speech-to-text technology will take care of everything and will generate the text transcript of your YouTube video.
9. Once the transcript is generated, in the files listing the status will be Done and you will be able to click it and view your YouTube video as text.

4. (Bonus) Edit the YouTube video text

Vatis Tech does not only come with an automated speech-to-text solution, it also comes with a transcript editor.

In the previous step, the one about uploading the YouTube video into the Vatis Tech application for transcribing, I told you that after the transcript is generated you can press on the video link.

I didn't tell you this then, but once you click on the video, a new page will open with the video's transcript as a text. In this page, if you would like, you can edit the text transcript.

Moreover, if you have multiple people speaking in your YouTube video, you can split your text by adding on each paragraph the person that is speaking - the +     Add speaker input on each paragraph.

So there you have it, not only you can transcribe your YouTube video to text using Vatis Tech, but you can also edit the text.

5. (Bonus) Download the text transcript for YouTube video subtitles

If you do not want to use the Vatis Tech editor, you also have four options of downloading the YouTube video text.

1. For this, press on the Download button at the bottom of the page.
2. This will open a menu with four options (SRT - subtitles file, PDF - non-editable file, DOCX - word or google docs file, TXT - plain text file).
3. After you choose your preferred way of downloading the text, once again press the Download button from the opened menu.
4. You YouTube video has now been downloaded as a text file onto your computer.

Now, if you wish to use the text as subtitles for your YouTube video, you just choose the SRT option.

6. (Bonus) Upload the transcript subtitles to YouTube video

This is quite easy, and it looks similar with the steps from downloading your YouTube video.

1. Sign in your YouTube account, and go to YouTube Studio.
2. On the left navigation menu, click on the Subtitles button link.
3. On the page that opens, select the YouTube video you would like to add subtitles to.
4. You will be redirected to that YouTube video's subtitles page, and under the Subtitles header, you should press the ADD button link.
             - if the subtitles page is blank, i.e. no table is shown, you should press the ADD LANGUAGE button to add a subtitle in another language.
             - NOTE: if not language is set, you will first be prompted with setting a language.
5. On the modal that opens, select the Upload file button link and then select the With timing option.
6. Select the downloaded .srt file from Vatis Tech.
7. Press on the PUBLISH button, and you are all set.

Conclusions

Nowadays, having a YouTube video with subtitles or captions helps you reach a broader audience. Vatis Tech comes to your help with one of the best automated speech-to-text technologies that can convert your YouTube video to text.

You can then use that text, as you subtitles or captions on YouTube.

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If you have any questions, please let us know at any of the bellow emails:

• emanuel@vatis.tech - Emanuel-Ioan Nazare, Web Developer @Vatis Tech
• support@vatis.tech - Support email @Vatis Tech