It prefers US spellings for words, like “color” or “favorite” or “realize”. If I have a human captioner on the day, I’ll tell them the names in advance so they know what to expect, but there’s no way to do the same for YouTube.

Here are a couple of changes I’m especially used to making: The YouTube auto-captioning software is good, but far from perfect. If it’s not clear from the transcript what I was saying, I’ll go back and rewatch the video, but I only need a few seconds at a time. I save that to a file, then I go through that text to add punctuation and tidy up mistakes. I start by using youtube-dl to download the automatically generated captions to a file. I can edit and polish the automatically generated transcript much faster than I could create my own from scratch. It’s not fantastically accurate, but it’s close enough to be a useful starting point. YouTube uses speech-to-text technology to automatically generate captions for any video that doesn’t already have them (in a handful of languages, at least). So what I do instead is lean on YouTube to get a first draft of a transcript, and then I tidy it up by hand. If I have to do it myself, writing a new transcript is a lot of work, and slows down posting the slides. Some conferences have live captioning (a human speech-to-text reporter transcribing everything I say, as I write it), which does the hard work for me! That’s great, and those transcripts are very high quality – but not every event does this. A transcript is a more accurate reflection of what I said on the day. I might add or remove something at the last minute, make subtle changes based on the mood of the audience, or make a reference to a previous session that wasn’t in my original notes.

I share a transcript rather than pre-prepared notes because I often ad lib the content of my talks. Here’s an example from P圜on UK last year: Assume Worst Intent. Plus, it makes the talk more accessible for people with hearing difficulties. A written transcript is easier to skim, to search, and for Google to index.

Along with the video, I like to post the slides afterwards, and include an inline transcript. When I give conference talks, my talks are often videoed and shared on YouTube.

Download youtube transcript as text