Marketing Matters - June 2025
ever try reading a sentence that didn’t have any capitalization or punctuation it’s not easy is it now image that sentence coming at you only three or four words at a time
That’s how users experience YouTube’s auto-captions. There’s no capitalization or punctuation and the words fly onto the screen a few at a time, which makes it difficult to follow the conversation.
Eighty percent of captions users are not deaf or hard of hearing. People watching videos in public may not want to turn the sound on. Learners of English use captions to help them learn the language.
While YouTube’s auto-captions are good start, they aren’t enough. Take the extra step to clean up the captions by adding punctuation and capitalization, and correcting any spelling errors. As an added bonus, proper captions will improve your video’s search result ranking.
You can edit auto-captions through the Subtitles menu in YouTube Studio. From there, you will have the option to Edit Timings or Edit Text. Select Edit Text to make your corrections. Taking that extra time will make your video more attractive to more viewers.
Pro tip: If you have access to Kaltura, upload the YouTube link there and then copy/paste the Kaltura transcript into YouTube. Kaltura adds punctuation and does a better job of spelling (especially with Mohawk College!).