Speaker 1: Here's how easily you can add closed captions or subtitles to your YouTube videos, shorts, live streams, on YouTube for free. Closed captions are a great way for your videos not only to be more inclusive, but it gives YouTube more metadata to help rank your videos with. YouTube uses the transcript to help match what you say with your own title, descriptions, chapters, and tags. YouTube uses AI when you're uploading content to provide captions and a transcript. While this has been around for a while, YouTube plans to use AI to help creators do even more, so keep watching to the end of this video to learn all about it. YouTube's not the only company using AI tools, and this gives me a moment to talk about this video's sponsor, Opus Clip, which makes creating captioned YouTube shorts, TikTok reels, and more even easier. Just take a YouTube video link of your own, or upload a video file, and Opus Clip will do the rest. I was able to take this hour-long live stream and make over 20 shorts within minutes. If you want to give Opus Clip a try, you can sign up for a free trial in the description down below. But don't worry, Opus Clip has a forever free version. Now let's get back to adding YouTube captions. First let's talk about where you can add captions, which is on the upload page on a desktop computer, or the video edit page. On the upload page, head over to the video elements tab. Click on the ADD for the ADD SUBTITLES option. The language default will be based on what you set at your YouTube channel level, which for me is English. You can change it to one of the 189 plus other languages that YouTube supports by clicking on the EDIT VIDEO LANGUAGE option here. Outside of this, you'll see three options. The first option is Upload a file, which if you paid a site like Rev.com to do captions, you can add them here. I usually do SRT files, but I'll have an article linked in the description down below on all the caption file types that YouTube supports. Next is Transcribe and Autosync, which lets you type or paste in a full transcript of the video, and the subtitle timings will be done automatically. The example I'm using now is from earlier in the video you're watching, and I'll do this now. I'll grab the text from my Google Doc here, paste it in, and you can see YouTube do its thing. The third option is to type manually. This lets you create captions by typing along with what's being said in the video. I'd recommend if you're going to choose this option, to select pause while typing. This makes it so much easier to create captions. Now the other way to add captions is on an existing video's details page. Under the video here, click on Subtitles. This will take you to the Subtitles slash Closed Captions page. Now once again, you'll see the text in your default channel language. If you do have multiple languages uploaded to your video, the captions will default to the original language of the video, which in my case is English. Now you can either edit the text by typing here, or my preferred way of editing the text captions by clicking on Edit Timings. I'm going to zoom out of the track here so you can see the captions line up where the audio is. What you're seeing is YouTube's AI at work. Let's focus back where it says edit as text. Click on the three dots here. From here, you can download what is written as an SRT file if you wanted to. Or you could clear the subtitle so you can edit the text by clicking the edit text here. This is where you can copy and paste your script slash closed captions, and it will automatically sync. Finally, you can just upload an SRT file like I mentioned before. Whenever you're done with your captions, click done and then on the left hand side you can see your subtitles. Now your subtitles slash closed captions might show up in the pending publish option if the video is a bit longer. Now if you need to re-edit them, you can do it here by clicking these three dots and selecting unpublish. From there just select edit. Once you're done you can select publish and this will put the captions live. It is important to note that while closed captions and subtitles are very similar, they're not necessarily the same thing. Closed captions are more of a transcription of dialogue, and subtitles are more of a translation. I'll be sure to include more resources in the description that kind of explain these differences better than I can. The way YouTube is using your closed captions slash subtitles is by creating a transcript. I'll show you on this video here. Click on these three dots here, then select show transcript. This lets YouTube use AI to generate auto chapters, it lets users search using the chapters that you've put in, and it lets YouTube use what's said in the video to use AI to come up with YouTube title suggestions. Here's a screenshot of what this looks like. Now I sadly don't have access to this feature right now, but I hopefully will soon. And when I do, you can expect a full video on this channel here. Do you want to learn more about YouTube? Check out that video on screen now. Want to learn more about Opus Clip? Check out that link in the description. I want to take this moment to thank Opus Clip for sponsoring this video. And remember, I'm Andrew Kan, and if I can add closed captions slash subtitles to YouTube videos for free, then you can too.