Editing Captions faster in Transcriptive

Captioning all your videos will make your content accessible to a wider audience and improve SEO, making them easier to discover when searching for content online. We have been working on making sure all our Youtube content is captioned, and Transcriptive has been instrumental in this process. It lets us create AI transcripts that can then be edited alongside the video, which makes it much easier to find and edit mistakes on the transcripts. 

However, even with all the AI technology behind our high-accuracy Transcriptive AI Premium speech engine, automated transcripts still have mistakes. Editing the text so they are 100% accurate can still be a time-consuming process. Here are some quick tips we found to be super helpful while editing AI transcripts in Transcriptive so they can be ready for captioning and subtitling much faster: 

Use the Glossary

The Glossary lets you prevent the AI from transcribing specific words and phrases incorrectly.. Enter proper names, jargon, medical terms, etc in the Glossary field before submitting the media for transcription  and the AI will try to include them in the transcript. For example, when I’m editing captions for a Transcriptive tutorial, I know the AI isn’t going to use the term “Transcriptive” (it usually comes back as “transcript of”). When I add “Transcriptive” to the Glossary, it comes back as “Transcriptive”, saving me an edit each time it comes up.

You can enter terms separated by commas, and then click “Create” to create a glossary list for that transcribing job. You do need to enter a new glossary for each job – it doesn’t remember your previous glossary entries – but you can save a list of terms in a text file and then paste them in. Here’s example of what I was pasting into the glossary field when captioning Transcriptive tutorial videos:

Transcriptive, Digital Anarchy, Premiere, Media Encoder, Speechmatics, Power Search, Rough Cutter, Batch Project, transcript, strikethrough

These terms come up a lot, and entering them when transcribing saves dozens of edits when editing the text.

Enter words in the Glossary field before submitting the media for transcription

Line Splitting and Auto-Punctuation

The transcribing AI is often good at identifying most of the words in a clip or sequence correctly, but can struggle to understand where sentences begin and end. A quick way to add a sentence break is to double click a word and press Enter – this will create a new paragraph starting with that word, automatically capitalize it, and automatically add a period to the end of the previous word. You can also use the Ctrl + left/right arrow (Command + left/right arrow on Mac) to move to the word you want to start the new paragraph with, and then press Enter.

Adding a period, question mark, or exclamation point to the end of a word will also automatically capitalize the next word to make adding new sentence breaks faster. Double-click or use Ctrl (Win) or Command (Mac) + left/right arrow to select the last word in the new sentence, then press right arrow to move the cursor to the end of that word, then type a period, question mark, or exclamation point to add that punctuation and automatically capitalize the next word.

To remove punctuation and merge two sentences, select a word with punctuation using double-click or Ctrl/Command + arrow, then press the right arrow to move the cursor to the end of the word, then delete the punctuation, then Ctrl/Command + right arrow to move to the next word and press the down arrow to make it lower-case – now the two sentences are one.

Sentence breaks and punctuation makes should match start/end of sentences

Change Playback Speed and Navigate the Transcript with Keyboard Shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts and buttons at the bottom of Transcriptive are extremely useful:

-The playback speed button toggles between 1x, 1.5x, and 2x playback speed. This is especially helpful for transcripts that don’t need many corrections, or that have a very slow speaker.

Ctrl+space starts or stops playback. You can also single-click or double-click a word during playback to jump to that word and automatically pause playback to make and edit.

-The keyboard shortcuts for previous/next word, previous/next sentence, and previous/next paragraph are often the fastest way to move the cursor to where you want to make an edit. Use these to move the highlight to a word, then start typing to replace it with the correct word.

Ctrl + Delete/Backspace deletes the selected word, and moves the highlight to the word before it. You can use this shortcut several times in a row to delete several words in a row.

Up or down arrow will change capitalization of the highlighted word. You can use this keyboard shortcut even if you single click a word to move the typing cursor to it to quickly capitalize proper nouns

-And of course, Ctrl+z to undo a change and Ctrl+Shift+z to redo a change.

Use shortcuts and playback buttons to navigate the text

Hopefully these tips help speed up the editing process. If you have any questions about Transcriptive, send us an email at cs@nulldigitalanarchy.com.

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