Add your own subtitles & closed captions
Subtitles and closed captions open up your content to a larger audience, including hearing impaired viewers or those who speak languages besides the one spoken in your video. If you already have captions or subtitles, get help editing or removing existing captions.
Note: If you’re in YouTube Studio, click Creator Studio Classic in the left menu to follow these steps.
Creating Subtitles and Closed Captions:
To speed up your work, you can also use these keyboard shortcuts:
Upload a file
Transcribe and auto-sync (original video language only)
You can transcribe your video and automatically line up your text with the speech in the video. A transcript contains the text of what is said in a video, but no time code information, so you need to set the timing to sync with your video.
Automatic timing for captions
Note: Since the transcript text is automatically synchronized to your video, the transcript must be in a language supported by our speech recognition technology and in the same language that's spoken in the video. Transcripts are not recommended for videos that are over an hour long or have poor audio quality.
Note: If you’re in YouTube Studio, click Creator Studio Classic in the left menu to follow these steps.
Setting the timings can take a few minutes. While you wait, you'll be brought back to the video tracklist. Once it's ready, your transcription will automatically be published on your video.
Tip: Check out our tips for creating transcript files.
Use automatic captioning
YouTube can use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos. If automatic captions are available, they'll automatically be published on the video. Learn how to review, edit, or unpublish automatic captions.
Automatic captions are available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.