5 Effective Ways To Add Subtitles To Your Videos Automatically

During the past few years, the importance of accessibility has increased dramatically.

As more and more people gain access to the Internet, it becomes increasingly important for business owners and marketers to make their content accessible to everyone, even those with disabilities.

Subtitles are one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. 

Still, as you can imagine, writing all the subtitles manually is no easy task, especially when dealing with long videos.

Fortunately, today there are technologies that automatically add subtitles to your videos.

Continue reading if you want to learn more. In this article, we’re going to list the five most effective ways to add subtitles to your videos automatically.

So let’s get right to it.

5 Ways of adding subtitles to your videos automatically

The following are the five best ways to add subtitles to videos automatically.

  1. Use a video editing app like iMovie

From iMovie – https://www.apple.com/imovie/ 

When thinking about adding subtitles to your video, one of the first things you can do is download a video editing app like iMovie.

The majority of these apps not only allow you to edit your videos by cutting them, adding special effects, like transitions, but also are able to automatically add subtitles to them.

Therefore, you can take advantage of these all-in-one apps for your subtitle automatic generation.

How to add subtitles in imovie

Understanding how to add subtitles in iMovies is simple and requires only a few steps:

  1. Open the app and import the video you wish to subtitle.
  2. Next, you will see a title sign on the viewer at the top. Click the Title sign.
  3. After you have clicked the title sign, pick the title style you desire. 
  4. Drag and drop the subtitle and synchronize it with the audio.
  1. Use a speech-to-text tool

From Amberscript’s website – https://www.amberscript.com/ 

It is also possible to add subtitles to your videos automatically using speech-to-text tools. With these tools, you can upload your videos and their artificial intelligence-powered systems will automatically generate subtitles and text for your audio or video files.

A manual subtitle service is usually offered alongside the automatic functionality to provide you with a greater degree of accuracy.

  1. Use YouTube’s automatic captioning

From YouTube Help – https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en

Globally, YouTube is the largest video sharing website. It is likely that you have planned to publish content on this platform. For your content to succeed on this platform as well as gain visibility, you need to make it as much accessible as possible. 

The good news is that YouTube utilizes speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos.

Machine learning algorithms generate the automatic captions, so the quality may vary. This means that you will probably need to edit these automatically-generated subtitles until they are just right.

How to add automatic subtitles on YouTube

  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left menu, select Subtitles.
  3. Click the video you want to add subtitles to.
  4. Review automatic captions and edit or remove any parts that haven’t been properly transcribed.
  1. Use an online automatic subtitle generator

From HappyScribe’s website – https://www.happyscribe.com/ 

There are many automatic subtitle generators on the web that will provide you with subtitles within a varying amount of time. 

You will find that the time requested varies depending on the service you choose, as many generators provide the option of using automatic tools for subtitles or hand-crafted subtitles, which can provide a higher degree of accuracy, but take longer to deliver (based on length of video).

  1. Use auto-subtitle capabilities of social media like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook

From TikTok – https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/introducing-auto-captions 

Also within the social media realm, guaranteeing accessibility to all has become increasingly important. Several social media platforms and applications, such as TikTok, now include features that allow users to automatically add subtitles to their videos in order to enhance their comprehension.

You may want to consider this option for short form videos, since many social media platforms have limitations on the length of videos that can be uploaded (such as TikTok with a maximum video length of 60 seconds).

Even so, it is a good solution to take into consideration when you need to share short videos or want to split a long video into shorter clips to share on social media.

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are the most popular social media networks with auto-captioning capabilities.

How to add automatic subtitles to TikTok 

  1. Upload or record the video.
  2. Click the “text” button ‌at the bottom of the TikTok screen to add captions.
  3. Choose a font style, text alignment, and color.
  4. Then, click on the caption to set the duration that aligns with the audio.

How to add automatic subtitles on Instagram

  1. Tap the three dots (menu) in the bottom right of your story. 
  2. Find Story Settings
  3. Scroll down to Accessibility.
  4. Tap the toggle beside Auto-Generated Captions.

How to add automatic subtitles on Facebook

  1. Click on the video you want to caption.
  2. Select the dot-menu on the right.
  3. Select Edit Video.
  4. Click Captions. You should see a box that tells you whether auto-captions are on or off.
  5. Click to turn it on.
  6. Scroll down to the bottom and click Review.

Conclusions

Video subtitles can enhance your video content and make it more accessible.

As a result of subtitles, your marketing efforts will improve in terms of interactions, exposure, and lead generation.

The good news is that there are many tools and alternatives to manually writing and adding subtitles to your videos, so you can save time and effort.

We outlined five effective ways in this article to automatically add subtitles to your videos. Depending on your needs and preferences, you can choose whichever works best for you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. Hopefully, it was informative and helpful to you.

If you want to read more, check out this article on the best five business automation software tools in 2022