YouTube auto-captions, explained

What they are

Captions YouTube writes itself with speech recognition, labelled "(auto-generated)".

Cost

Free, on every channel.

Turning them on

Nothing to switch on: YouTube adds them to uploads in supported languages.

Languages

About 70 for uploads and Shorts; live streams get English only.

When they appear

After the upload has processed, not always right away; longer and noisier audio takes longer.

Editing

In YouTube Studio, under Subtitles. Your edits become a separate track.

Look

YouTube's own style. Creators can't style them; viewers can restyle captions in the player.

When a video finishes processing, YouTube runs its audio through Google's speech recognition and times each line to the speech. The result goes up as a caption track named after the language, such as English (auto-generated), which viewers turn on with the CC button.

The model hears only the audio. It doesn't read your title, description or tags, so it has no way to know how your guest's name or your product is spelled, and the same mistake comes back on every upload.

Google lists about 70 languages for automatic captions on uploads and Shorts, including English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Arabic, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean. Live streams are captioned in English only. The full list is on YouTube Help.

Some widely spoken languages, Urdu among them, aren't on the list, and videos that switch between languages, such as Hindi and English in the same sentence, are one of the cases where YouTube may skip captions or get them badly wrong.

Google gives these reasons automatic captions may not appear:

• They aren't ready yet, because the audio is complex or the video is long.
• The spoken language isn't supported.
• The video is too long.
• The sound is poor, or the speech isn't recognised.
• There's a long silence at the start.
• Several people talk at once, or more than one language is spoken.

In any of these cases, upload a caption file instead, or caption the video with another tool.

As a creator there's nothing to enable: YouTube adds automatic captions to every upload in a supported language.

As a viewer, press CC on the player, or open Settings (the gear) → Subtitles/CC and pick the auto-generated track. On a phone, tap the video, then CC. The Options in that menu change the font, colour and size.

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio and choose Subtitles in the left menu.
2. Click the video.
3. Next to the automatic track, choose Duplicate and edit, correct the lines that are wrong and click Publish.

Your version goes up as a new track and the automatic one stays. The step-by-step guide to fixing YouTube's auto-captions covers the editor, and removing auto-generated captions shows how to hide the automatic track so viewers see only yours.

For a casual vlog with one clear speaker, often yes. They fall short when the words matter most: guest names, brands, product models, technical terms and mixed-language speech. They also can't be styled by the creator, and the “auto-generated” label tells viewers no one checked them.

Uploading your own captions fixes all of that, but on a busy channel it means editing every video by hand.

CaptionMe connects to your channel once and captions each new upload automatically, using your title, description, tags and past corrections as spelling hints, so names come out right the first time. It transcribes more than 52 languages, Urdu included, lets you set the spoken language per channel when detection struggles (on videos that mix Hindi and English, for example), and publishes the result as its own caption track under your name instead of “auto-generated”. You can review each video by email first or let it publish on its own.

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