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Very few moments in life are quite as frustrating as trying to find a specific section in a YouTube video. Not only is it incredibly time consuming to skip through a video’s timeline, but it’s also quite fiddly. Fortunately, searching YouTube transcripts can provide an easy fix to both these problems. With just the click of a few buttons, you can find exactly what you want in mere minutes.
1. Open the Transcript
To begin, go to YouTube and open the video that you are interested in. Once the video is open, click on the menu button to expand it. From the two options produced, select Open Transcript. After you’ve selected that, the video’s transcript will open and become visible to its right. The transcript will appear as a series of lines with the corresponding timestamps.
Right below the transcript, it shows the language that the transcript is set to. In most cases, this will be English. However, it may instead be set to Auto-generated. If that is the case, select Auto-generated and switch it to English instead. This is because auto-generated captions use AI. As such, this transcript option is often not the most accurate. Sections may have missing words or even be entirely incorrect. Consequently, by using automatically generated captions you may find it difficult to find the section of the video you are interested in.
2. Search the Transcript
First, open your browser’s search functions. For Windows users, the hotkey is Ctrl + F. Mac users can use Cmd + F. Once the search bar is open, input the word or term you are looking for and press Enter. If the term is located in the transcript, each instance of it will be highlighted. To move between the highlighted instances, press the arrow keys in the search bar. Alternatively, you can hit Enter again to just go to the next instance. When you have found the section you want, click on the line to jump straight to that part of the video.
Woohoo! You can now search YouTube transcripts! Trust us, the saved time will really start to add up.
Final Words
Having quality captions is key to being able to quickly find the section you want, such as when searching YouTube transcripts. If the video‘s captions are low quality, then they might not include the desired search terms. As such, it will be much harder for viewers to find what they want. Moreover, it will be harder for search engines to index the video. Accordingly, it won’t rank very high in any search results. All of this will make it harder to engage a wider audience. For this reason, it‘s a good idea to add captions to your video.
Many creators often forgo video transcripts, due to the hassle. Fortunately, with Rev, you can order high-quality captions and transcripts from just $1.25/minute.