AI Captions: Save Money and Time Captioning Video Content

Rev is excited to introduce a new product innovation: AI Captions. This service automatically generates accurate captions with lightning speed.

Simply upload your video file, select “AI Captions” on the order checkout page, and let Rev work its magic – your video captions will be ready for use in minutes, not hours. Keep reading to learn more about how AI Captions can improve your efficiency, foster collaboration, and make your video content more accessible.

Use case: how video captions increase engagement

According to HubSpot, video content viewership is expected to reach and surpass 3.5 billion users in 2023. In fact, it has been predicted that video content will account for 82.5% of all web traffic in 2023. From Instagram, to Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn, all of the major social media players are continually optimizing their platforms to prioritize video over other forms of media.

This poses an important question for anyone who manages video content: to caption or not to caption?

To quantify the impact that adding captions to videos can have on your engagement, let’s take a look at the following statistics:

• According to the American Press Institute, 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound.
• Lemonlight, a renowned video production company, finds that captioned video content experiences up to a 40% increase in views.
• Though there are differences between captions and subtitles, a holistic study from Kapwing found that:
  • 75% of viewers turn to captions or subtitles when a video has poor audio quality.
  • 29% of viewers use captions or subtitles to avoid disturbing those around them.
  • 27% of viewers reported that captions or subtitles help them retain focus on video subject matter.

All of this to say – if you’re not already captioning your videos, you’re losing out on precious views, engagement, and ultimately conversions.

The question now becomes: if it’s such a crucial driver for engagement across so many channels, why doesn’t everybody caption their video content?

The unfortunate reality is, fast and easy video captioning is already offered on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, but end product quality suffers. From name misspellings, to unfortunate misinterpretations resulting in potentially inappropriate content being generated, an in-depth Quality Assurance process for these AI captions is highly necessary.

If you find a solution to outsource video captioning, the end result is higher quality, but the process is much slower. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of “best of both worlds” option – until now.

The benefits of automated video captioning

The advantages of AI-generated video captions are not just about engagement – adding captions to videos can enhance accessibility for users who are Deaf or hard of hearing, make video content easier to digest, and even provide an SEO boost by making your video content more searchable on the web.

Rev’s auto-generated captions are accessible

Today, video captions benefit more than just the Deaf and hard of hearing – however, it is still an important accessibility component to include if you or your organization frequently use speaker-focused video content for internal purposes, marketing, knowledge sharing, and more.

The captions generated by Rev’s AI Captioning services are capable of making your video content easily accessible for Deaf or hard of hearing users, as well as those viewing content on muted devices.

AI captions make video content easier to digest

Adding captions to internal meeting recordings, events, or other content is a game-changer for knowledge sharing purposes. Numerous studies have shown that closed captions improve literacy and reading comprehension. It also gives viewers the ability to watch the full video without sound, allowing them to take in vital information without having to find a quiet room, grab their headphones, or worry about disturbing those around them.

Using AI captioning services boosts your content’s SEO

Websites with more high-quality, keyword-dense content perform better on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Both open and closed captions give Google more text to crawl and index, allowing it to better determine how relevant and useful your website’s content is.

• Open captions are permanently “burned into” the video, meaning users cannot turn them off. Rev’s AI Captions offer you the option to burn your captions into the video with the click of a button.
• Closed captions are typically the more familiar format (think Facebook and YouTube), where users are able to turn them on and off as they desire.

Since search engines are able to “read” both types of captions, regardless of whether they are closed or open, highly intentional video content with captions is a large SEO opportunity.

Save time and money while transforming your productivity

In addition to all of the aforementioned benefits, Rev’s AI Captions services generate usable captions in minutes, not hours – meaning your video content can be leveraged not only more effectively, but also faster.

Plus, users still retain all of the same benefits of Rev’s other services – shareable links, file editing capabilities, and Rev’s best-in-class, AI-driven Automatic Speech Recognition software.

Who can benefit from AI-generated video captions?

Rev’s AI Captions services are ideal for individual and company-wide use across a variety of industries and niches. Discover the benefits of using Rev:

• Social media or marketing managers – given the rise and continued growth of video content across social and marketing channels, social media managers and marketing teams greatly benefit from the engagement boost that video captioning brings, with the added advantage of less time and effort spent on creating them.
• Educators or online course creators – it has been suggested that online learning has yet to hit its profitability peak. Teachers, professors, digital thought leaders, webinar providers, and more are now able to present hours of video e-learning content in a more digestible, accessible, and search engine-friendly format.
• Journalists – the number of readers of digital news media is expected to reach 1.9B by 2027. Distill information from video interviews, events, and press conferences and make informative, journalistic content more accessible to all readers.
• Consultants, speakers, and presenters – adding auto-generated captions allows thought leaders to leverage client presentations, conference recordings, and pitches in a more effective way. Be heard, understood, and found by any and all with AI Captions.
• Filmmakers and producers – filmmaking is a lengthy process with hundreds of moving parts, meaning information can get lost and steps can be forgotten. Build a library of documentation for pre-production content and improve the quality and accessibility of documentaries or films.
• HR managers or trainers – create useful training, onboarding, and process-focused materials for both client and internal needs.

Human-generated vs. AI captions: which do you need?

Rev offers several ways to caption video content: Human-Generated Captioning, and AI Captions. Though the end goal for these services is the same, there are scenarios where you may consider choosing one over the other:

• AI Captions: Fully auto-generated captions with 90% accuracy, giving users a fast and low-cost solution to create video captions for large amounts of video content with minimal time spent. You also get access to Rev’s caption editor, as well as sharing and collaboration tools.
• Human-Generated Standard Captions: Access to Rev’s caption editor, atmospherics, and speaker identification, enhanced by human captioners to achieve 99% accuracy. This is our most popular captioning service, and has the optimal balance between speed and caption accuracy. Standard captions are ADA, 508, and 504 compliant.
• Human-Generated Premium Captions: FCC broadcast compliant captions, packaged with everything included in Standard Captions, plus vertical caption placement and silence tags – all enhanced by the top 5% of human captioners. This service is ideal for users who want to spend as little time as possible (if any) editing the final caption file to ensure accuracy. Premium Captions are also ADA, 508, and 504 compliant.

Why choose Rev for video captions?

Video captions generated by a powerful AI tool can have significant impacts on your efficiency, productivity, and video engagement.

Rev provides high-quality, easy-to-use solutions for individual and enterprise clients in a variety of industries – click below to learn more or get your AI captions today.