How To Add Captions To Your Linked In Videos

Hi Everyone

I recently posted a video talking about different presentation styles and how to improve. I really wanted to add captions but didn't know how to. Hector Minto showed me how, so I thought I'd pay it forward and show you how. Captions make the video more accessible (yay!) and help out those that want to watch a video but need it muted.

Here is the video before

Here is the video with captions

First thing to know is that his method requires access to Microsoft Stream. Stream does all the speech to text work for you and means you don't have to type anything out. Second, this assumes you will post the video on Linked In. If you don't have access to Stream or don't want to post to Linked In, this isn't for you.

The basic flow is:

1. Upload your video to Stream
2. Download a transcription of the audio in VTT format
3. Edit the VTT with any inaccuracies
4. Convert the VTT file to an SRT file to be used with captions
5. Upload your video to Linked In with the SRT file
6. Bingo you have a captioned video on Linked In

Let's go through it step by step in detail:

1. Upload the video to Stream. You need Microsoft 365 for this and can access it where you get all your Microsoft M365 Apps

2. When the video is uploaded and the transcription has been processed click the 3 circles and click "Update Video Details"

3. Click "Download File" next to Captions

4. Edit any inaccuracies in your favorite text editor and make sure you keep the file extension as a VTT file. Don't save it as a .txt file. Stream is pretty awesome at speech recognition so hopefully there won't be too many issues

5. Convert the VTT file to a SRT file. This is a different file type that Linked In uses. I used the following 3rd party website to do this. https://subtitletools.com/convert-to-srt-online. Save the SRT file somewhere you remember it

6. Upload the video on Linked In and make sure you point the video to the SRT file. When you upload a video click edit then "Select Caption". Point it to the SRT file you just generated

7. Boom. You've got a captioned video