YouTube’s announcement last week that it would begin supporting automated video captioning caused a lot of excitement in the video commerce and video SEO worlds.  Then the balloon popped.

Automating speech-to-text has long been a goal of those seeking to make video more search engine friendly.   Unfortunately, the YouTube technology isn’t ready for prime time.  Google says the technology is in “beta,” but applying that moniker might be going a little far.  The technology is so bad it’s almost embarrassing.  I’d go into details, but in this case, a video’s worth a thousand words.

1.  Click on then hover your mouse over the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the player, then hover your mouse over the small arrow directly to the left of the CC icon.

2.  Click “transcribe audio.”

For now, the best practice in transcribing speech to text is to have a person do it. Until next time…

Happy Selling!