Benefits of creating transcripts for your course videos

[00:00:00] Introduction and Improvements in Machine Learning for Transcription

Alright, so I will start by talking about why you need to make your videos, transcribe your videos, why you want to create transcripts for your videos. And before I go there, let me just talk about a couple of things. There have been a lot of improvements in machine learning in general and deep learning specifically, which has happened in the last year or so. And what has happened as a result is that when you use machine learning for transcribing audio, so this you provide an audio file like an mp3 file and you try to do speech recognition on that mp3 file, what happens is that most of the technical jargon is now pretty accurately recognized. And the second thing is that the speaker’s accent does not seem to matter much. In fact, I have tried this for a while now, I have been working with videos and trying to transcribe them automatically for a while. And I can tell you that even for non-native English speakers, the transcription quality has improved dramatically in the last year or so. That is it has gone from let us say about 80% accuracy on technical jargon kind of words, the accuracy of that has gone up to maybe 90, 95%, which is actually it is not 100, but it is actually so close to 100 that you can read the transcript and you can understand what is going on.

[00:01:31] The Role of Chat GPT in Transcript Formatting

But there has been an even bigger improvement recently, which has made this even better, which is you can take the transcript which is auto-generated and you can send it to chat GPT that is you can create a prompt asking chat GPT to format the transcript as well as remove typos and fix mistakes and things like that and it actually does a pretty good job. So because of all these recent developments, it is now possible to sort of automate the whole process, you know, you create the mp3 file of your video and then you send it across to transcribe the mp3 and then you take the transcript and then you format it and then I will also talk about a few more things we can do and you will see that it ends up with a very professional transcript.

[00:02:22] Benefits of Video Transcripts

Now what are the benefits of adding these video transcripts? Let us say that you decide to create transcripts. So the first thing, the most obvious one is that it makes it very easy for people to navigate your videos, your students. That is because they can skim the transcript to understand what the video covers, what is the content of the video and they can also use the find feature, the control F in the text to see to find specific words and then they can see if that topic is covered in the video, right?

[00:02:56] Using GPT API to Generate Subheadings and Chapters

That is the first thing and then once you generate the transcript, you can also use the GPT API to auto generate subheadings that are, that is chapters for your videos. Now this actually makes it even easier for students to navigate your videos because you can see that it provides like a table of contents for a single video and this means that you can hover over the video’s seek bar and you will be able to jump to specific chapters or you know, specific topics which are discussed in the video, right?

[00:03:31] Adding Chapters to Videos and Making Videos Searchable

And once you get these chapters, what you can also do is you can just add the chapters into the video itself and what I mean by that is it is now quite common for these video hosting services including YouTube to provide a way for people to add chapters to videos, which means that you just specify the start and end point of that subheading or the subtopic and you can, it will create this hover effect, okay? So that is something that you can do because of the fact that you got these chapters and once you add transcripts for all your videos, that means your entire catalog of videos becomes searchable which means that people can search not only the title and maybe if you have a description of the video or something like that, they can also search the words which are spoken in that video. So you can take the sort of the universal search bar you might have on your WordPress site and when they search it, they can also find videos which talk about a specific topic.

[00:04:35] Creating Course Previews for Video Lessons

And another thing that I have done, this depends on LearnDash but I think it is possible in all the other learning management software. This is creating course previews for video lessons. Now if you want to create a course preview, usually what you can do is you can take the first few words of every lesson and then you can generate something which looks like this table I have created but the problem with videos is that you cannot do it because it is video content, right? But if you create a transcript, you can take the words from the transcript and you can create the preview for the transcript instead, right?

[00:05:12] Conclusion: The Affordability and Quality of Automated Transcription

So these are some benefits of creating, that is doing the transcription for the videos in your online courses and I will also say that even though this has been possible for a while, earlier it used to be expensive and I will say that the more professional you wanted it to be, the more money you had to spend and now it has become very affordable and you can get pretty good results, maybe not as good as what you can get from actual professional transcriptionists but you can still get something which is very close to that and at a small fraction of the cost.