Getting Captions Right
Transcription is good at ordinary words and poor at unusual ones. The words it gets wrong in your videos will be the ones that matter most: your company name, your product names, the names of the people speaking.
This matters beyond the subtitles themselves. The transcript is what Zyntro reads to write a video's summary, description and tags, so a misheard brand name is repeated into everything written about the video.
Three tools handle it, and they work at different moments.
The three tools and when each one acts
| Tool | When it acts | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Transcription vocabulary | While a new video is being transcribed | Preventing the mistake — your names, spelled correctly, before the video arrives |
| Caption corrections | To the transcript of every video, before the summary is written | Fixing a mistake that keeps happening, everywhere, once |
| Correct Captions on one video | On demand, to that video's subtitle track | Fixing one video that is already published |
Before You Begin
- A list of the names transcription is likely to mishear — your brand, products and key people
Steps
Add your words to the transcription vocabulary
Video Settings > Transcription Vocabulary. One phrase per line: your brand name, product names, the names of people who appear regularly, any industry term specific to you.
This biases transcription towards spelling them your way. Your brand name is there by default.
Set up caption corrections
Video Settings > Caption Corrections, lower down the same page. Each row is a find and a replace: the wrong spelling on the left, the right one on the right.
Add a pair for every mistake you see repeatedly. These are saved once for the brand and used in two places — automatically on each new video's transcript, and as the starting point when you fix one video by hand.
Understand when corrections are applied
Corrections are applied to the transcript before Zyntro reads it to write the summary, description and tags.
That is why they are worth setting up properly. A correction fixes the spelling everywhere it would otherwise have spread, rather than only in the subtitles a viewer reads.
Fix one video that is already out there
Open the video's settings page from the gear icon in the library and find Correct Captions. Your saved brand corrections are pre-filled; add or change pairs for this video, then choose Apply Caption Fix.
A corrected subtitle track is produced and attached to the video. This takes a moment and happens in the background — the page tells you when the job has been accepted.
Fix every video at once
The library has a Fix Captions button that submits a correction across every Ready video in one go, using your saved brand corrections.
Use it after you have added a correction that affects your whole back catalogue. It runs in the background and reports how many videos were submitted, skipped and failed. Corrected tracks appear as each one finishes.
Result
New videos are transcribed with your names spelled correctly from the start. Mistakes that slipped through earlier are corrected everywhere, and the summaries and tags written from those transcripts are clean too, once regenerated.
Important: A caption fix changes the subtitles. It does not change the summary, description or tags that were already written from the uncorrected transcript. After a fix, open the video's settings page and choose Regenerate Metadata so the written text matches the corrected transcript.
Warning: Regenerating overwrites anything you edited by hand in the summary, description or tags, with no version history. If you have rewritten a description you want to keep, copy it out first.
Tip: Watch for the mistake you have stopped noticing. A brand name misheard the same way in every video is easy to read past because you know what it is meant to say — but a visitor reading the subtitles does not, and neither does the text Zyntro wrote from it.
