In this tutorial Sheryl Plouffe walks viewers through the process of adding closed captions to an already‑published YouTube video using YouTube’s built‑in auto‑generation feature. She begins by opening the video manager, selecting a video, and clicking the Subtitles/CC button. After choosing the language (English) and the “Create New Subtitles” method, she opens the Actions dropdown and selects “Auto‑generate.” YouTube instantly produces a transcript, which Sheryl reviews and edits for spelling (e.g., correcting her name), punctuation, capitalization, and any mis‑heard words. She notes that the editing step typically takes 30‑45 seconds for a short video. Once satisfied, she clicks “Save changes,” and the CC badge appears on the video thumbnail and on the channel’s video list. The video ends with a brief personal‑brand plug, directing viewers to her website and free trainings. The tutorial is instructional, concise, and includes a light personal anecdote about her cat.
Chapters
We're going to focus on YouTube today. There are various ways that you can do it, but I'm going to show you one way to auto-generate your YouTube captions on your videos. So like I said, I'll be as descriptive as possible. Let's presume you have a YouTube channel. We are looking at mine right now. I'm choosing a short video for demonstration purposes here. So go into your— into the videos that you have and choose the video that you've already published to YouTube. And what you'll do is you click on it and you get into the— I guess this would be called the video manager. Let me pause that so we don't hear my actual video there. So where we are now is we are in the portion of the video where we could either share it or embed it. What we want to do is we want to click on the subtitles, the little CC at the bottom in the boxes. So we're going to click on Subtitles/CC. And that brings us into a new box that has the video in question. And then over to the right-hand side, we can see a blue bar that says Add New Subtitles or CC, and then another box that says Purchase New Subtitles or CC. What we want to do is we're going to add— click on the blue box that says Add New Subtitles or CC. We're going to choose our language, which in this case is English. And then you'll see a list that says, "Select your method. Choose how you want to add subtitles or closed captions to this video." What I'm going to show you how to do is the Create New Subtitles. We click on that bar and then the video box moves over to the right-hand side. But on the left at the top, there's an Actions box. It's a dropdown menu. What you do is you click on the Actions box And there's 3, there are 3 choices: auto-generate, upload a file, or download. What we're going to do here is auto-generate. So this is great, especially if you've done your video in a way where you've spoken clearly and if you don't mumble too much in your video, the auto-generation of, you know, the captioning here from YouTube is actually pretty good. It's fairly accurate. This is a short video that I'm using as an example here. It's only about a minute and 9 seconds long. But when I click on auto-generate, it auto-generates instantly the text of what I've said in that video. Now, it's not perfect, and this is where it's going to take a little bit of time to go in and finesse it and to tweak where there are some spelling mistakes or where the auto-generation tool didn't quite hear what you said. So, for example, also with spelling, in this case with my name, it's spelling it with a C, which is more common. So I definitely want to go in and change that to an S in my case. You could also go in and fix the grammar. So for example, if you wanted to have capital letters at the start of each sentence, it doesn't do a great job of adding periods and distinguishing where sentences begin and end. So if you want to go in and do that, if that's important to you, it may not be, and that's fine. Typically, and as I look through this, this is a minute and 9-second video of mine, Let's see. So it did not recognize my last name. Well, that's fairly to be expected, you know, with a different name like Plouffe. So that's okay. So I want to add, hey, because I know I said, hey everybody, it's Sheryl Plouffe here. It's— so I'm just going to change that. It's— I'm just typing this as I go. It's Sheryl Plouffe here. Hopefully And I'm going to add, you are doing well. Thank you so much for expressing your interest in coming to our live seminar. And as the details start to gel, we've now got a venue, blah, blah, blah. So it goes on and on. There aren't that many mistakes. As I look through this right now, I can see that there's a few little places where I could change. It didn't quite understand the word that I was speaking in the video at that point. But overall, This would probably not take me more than literally 30 to 45 seconds to go in and just scan through this auto-generated transcription, really, of my video and do the necessary tweaks. So you spend 30 to 45 seconds doing that and boom, you've got yourself— you save changes, you go to the top right-hand corner, there's a blue box, save changes, and that's it. You're good to go. You've got now subtitles on YouTube on your video. You're also going to now see the little CC box is going come up on your channel. So if I go back to my channel and I look at my videos, at least it should be there. Might take a few seconds. Let's just take a look. Yeah, it's there. So now I look back on my video where I'm seeing all my thumbnails on my, on my board, on my video channel, and I can see the video now underneath. It says it has the little box with a CC for closed caption in there. So I hope that was helpful for you. Thank you so much for listening or watching to Personal Personal Brand Breakthrough with Sheryl Plouffe. I'm really excited to launch this show for you. My cat just walked behind the computer. Yes, that's what you saw if you're watching on the video. He likes to sit behind the computer. Don't ask me why. Otherwise, please visit me at SherylPlouffe.com and take part in some of the free trainings that I offer there. So thank you so much for listening today and watching, and I can't wait to see you next time on Personal Brand Breakthrough. Have a great day.
