How to fix YouTube's auto-captions

YouTube transcribes every upload with one general speech model. It knows common words well and your words poorly:

• Names and brands. A guest called Siobhán or a product called Notion AI comes out as whatever common words sound closest.
• Jargon. Gaming terms, camera models, medical or legal vocabulary: anything a general model rarely hears.
• Accents, crosstalk and music. Overlapping voices and loud backing tracks drop words or invent them.
• No context. It works from the audio alone, so it can't know that “sony a seven four” means Sony A7 IV.

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio and choose Subtitles in the left menu.
2. Click the video.
3. In the Subtitles column, choose Edit for the language. For automatic captions, choose Duplicate and edit, then Continue.
4. Click into a line and correct the text. Keep each line short so it stays readable on a phone.
5. Click Publish.

Your edits go up as a new track; the automatic one stays alongside it. To show viewers only yours, see how to remove auto-generated captions.

For long videos it can be quicker to fix a caption file in a text editor and upload it with Upload file, choosing With timing. If your file is in the wrong format, the caption converter turns SRT, VTT, SBV and ASS into each other.

• Fix the names first. Errors cluster around the same few words; fix those and most of the track reads fine.
• Watch the first minute with sound off. If it makes sense muted, the captions are doing their job.
• Don't retime unless you must. Changing text keeps YouTube's timing; rewriting whole lines is where captions drift out of sync.

Studio edits fix one video. The next upload starts again from the same model, with the same mistakes.

CaptionMe captions each new upload as soon as YouTube announces it, using your title, description and tags as spelling hints, so names come out right the first time. When you do correct a word in its editor, it's added to your channel's vocabulary for every later video. Captions arrive by email to review, with a one-click publish link, and go up as their own track under your name rather than “English (auto-generated)”.

It's free for 60 minutes. See how it compares with YouTube's auto-captions.