Annoying Youtube Transcribe Feature

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

What is this new Youtube Transcribe feature?

I noticed this a little bit earlier today as I tried to upload another video on my blog. All of a sudden, my video had all these subtitles floating all over my video. I first saw it and thought – “Hey that’s a pretty cool feature.” but then I looked closely and saw that the transcribe is nowhere near as accurate to what I’m actually saying in the video. So what the heck? From here on, panicking, I tried to look at just how the heck this Youtube transcribe feature happened. I was thinking, maybe I accidentally turned it on from one of the options in my camera? Did my camera software even have such an option?

And then I looked into my Youtube channel and went into the options and stuff. I did not want to spend too much time looking but being a bit impatient and in a bit of a rush, I couldn’t find any way to turn it off somehow.

Is this Youtube transcribe feature generic?

Well I started watching all these other videos that weren’t mine and I was thinking, is this Youtube transcribe feature just something I turned on or was it like some new feature? So I started watching all these random videos on Youtube just to see if it was just me. Next thing I know, all these other videos I’ve been watching was transcribed – with useless captions that don’t even match what is being said in the actual video. Even background noises were some how being made into words out of nowhere! This was getting really annoying. It could potentially distract a lot of my viewers as it was distracting me right now.

So is there a way to get rid of this Youtube transcribe feature some how?

After some digging around, you CAN turn this off in the Settings. I logged in to my Youtube back office and it was pretty simple. Go to your Settings and go to the Playback option. From there, you can simply turn it off at the Captions option by un-checking the boxes. No need to panic. Needless to say, I panicked, lol. Seriously, I was excited about uploading my video that I did today and like suddenly blobs of text were filling my screen. You would’ve been shocked too. But do you reckon this is ringing the alarm bells for us to start hosting our videos on our own sites? After all, Youtube can pretty much do whatever they want once our videos are up there, right? I may actually contemplate hosting my videos on some place I actually own.

Anyway, so I got that out of the way. We can all now keep posting videos and watching them without having to worry about blobs of incorrect text getting in the way. But this Youtube transcribe feature seemed to be an interesting move. Or maybe I was oblivious to it the whole time. I actually just discovered it and kinda panicked like a fish out of water.

Needless to say, videos are important for our blogs. Blogging is how I make money. Find out how. At least you also know how to turn off that Youtube transcribe thing.