Transcribe course videos

Two outputs from one pass

A lesson transcript is useful in two forms. Captions (SRT or VTT) are timed cues that a video player shows over the picture. A transcript is plain text a learner can read, search or print. Both come from the same edited draft, so you correct names and terms once. The difference between the two is explained in transcript or subtitles.

A workflow for a whole course

1. Export each lesson as a video or audio file. A course platform's own player is not read; you upload files.
2. Upload a lesson above. If the course is not in English, set the spoken language.
3. Read the draft against the lesson, correcting product names, jargon and anything on a slide that was read aloud. Keep one list of terms and reuse it for every lesson.
4. Export SRT or VTT and add it to the video wherever your course platform accepts a caption file; platforms differ, and some generate their own.
5. Check reading speed and line length with the free subtitle checker, then export plain text for a lesson handout.

Chapters and navigation

Each line carries a timestamp, so you can find where a topic starts and write a list of chapters for a long lesson. The free chapters checker tidies a list of timestamps if your lessons live on YouTube. Searching the text is also how you answer the learner who asks where in the course you covered a topic.

Accessibility, honestly

Learners who are deaf or hard of hearing, who study in a second language, or who watch with the sound off all benefit from accurate captions. Machine captions are a draft: they can miss a technical term or a name, and nobody should publish them unread. Whether captions meet a legal or institutional accessibility requirement is for you or your institution to decide with the people responsible, and we make no compliance claim. The captions checklist lists what to check.

Which plan fits

Without an account you can try one file at a time, up to 15 minutes and 25 MB, 3 tries a day, with nothing to sign up for. Pro is $9.99 a month for 600 transcription minutes a month (10 hours of audio), with files up to 500 MB and 120 minutes each. Pro+ is $19.99 a month for 2,500 minutes a month, files up to 1 GB and 180 minutes each, and priority processing when the queue is busy. Paid plans are billed monthly in US dollars with PayPal and can be cancelled from your Billing page; transcripts you already made are not deleted when a plan ends.

A course of forty 10-minute lessons is 400 minutes of audio, inside Pro's 600 minutes a month; a larger catalogue is a multi-month job on Pro or a fit for Pro+. Uploads are limited per hour (Pro 20, Pro+ 40), so a big batch is spread across a few hours.