 Hello, I'm Neil and I help as many people as possible to get ideas out of their heads and out into the world to make more people laugh because I think we might need it at the moment. Welcome back to the Happy Hearts. In this video, this will definitely help get some happy ideas out. I'm hoping that you've stumbled upon this video, upon, because you're searching for how to transcribe a video for free. That's right, for free. This is the way to do it. It's a really brilliant method. I've been using it for about a year now and oh my goodness, it's saved me so much typing, so much grief and it's so easy. All you need is a YouTube account and if you're watching this, I'm taking a wild gamble that you have a YouTube account. So let's dive in and I'll show you how to do it. So this is the video that I want to transcribe. It's a video of me on BBC News 24 from a hundred years ago back when I had hair. Comedy awards like the open mic offer new comedians much more than prize money. And I wasn't looking for a free transcription service. Let's get rid of this guy. I wasn't actually looking for a free transcription app or websites. I just wanted to get to the subtitles file that contained the subtitles that YouTube auto generates every time you upload a video. Let me back up a bit. Every time you upload a video to YouTube, whether it's public or private, it automatically auto generates a transcript. That's why when you press on this button here, the subtitles or closed captions button, it brings up the subtitles that it has automatically detected. Let me play you a bit of this video just to show you what I mean. Productions and that all-important 15 minutes of fame. But the prize every comedian would give their best line for is this one, the Perrier Award. So let's pause it there. This is absolutely amazing. It's got better within the year. I'm recording this at the end of 2019. I swear in the last six months, the standard of the auto-generated subtitles is just phenomenal and it even manages to capture English accents or as you can hear here, Scottish accents. I mean, we're all speaking slowly and clearly. And sometimes when I go a bit southern England, it struggles the key part. But by and large, it pretty much captures all the words that are in the video. And as you can see on this line here, the only word it couldn't catch is the brand name Perrier. So all I wanted to do was to get a transcript, which is also generated out of YouTube so I could use it as a transcript on my blog or I could even put it back into YouTube as my own correct subtitle file where I've corrected the words that it's struggled with. At an extreme, you can even use this to transcribe a video and use that transcript to release a book. I even managed to release an entire book on Amazon based on that. It's a chat with my dad about being a taxi driver in the 1960s in London. But then you do the suburbs. Afterwards. Yes. Kind of a couple of parents, you know. Can't think of anything. I hated it. I ended up releasing that as an entire book, that transcript there. And that was all from capturing the auto-generated captions, getting them out of YouTube and you can publish on Amazon if you wanted. It's a brilliant technique for just transcribing any words, any thoughts that you want to have written down. This method is by far and away the best that I've found. And also if you're interested in writing, it's often a lot easier to say the thoughts out loud and to then afterwards turn that into some kind of transcription and use that text as a thing to edit, rather than having to write it out by hand or type it. It does help to speak freely off the top of your head and then capture those words and use that text to edit later. So anyway, if you want to have a look at that video, that's up above and if you click on the I, it's there. But let's go back to the video that I want to transcribe. This BBC News 24 report. This BBC talent scout says, comedians treat the festival as a trade fair and the perrier is harmless fun. It isn't the only way to develop your career. All right, there I am back in the 1990s with Machunky Oatmeal Nitswear. Let's use this vision of turmoil to capture the transcription. I'll show you exactly where to go. Firstly, you need to upload your video or your recording to YouTube. There are lots of other videos on the Internet to show you how to do that. I'm going to assume that you've already got the video up. It doesn't have to be public. It could be unlisted, so nobody need ever see this. You can do this with MP3 recordings, but you have to transfer. I'm talking at the end of 2019. At this stage, you're not allowed to upload MP3 recordings to YouTube. So what you'd want to do there is to convert it to an MP4 file or some kind of video file and then upload that to YouTube. Once the video is in YouTube and you can see it, give it a couple of hours. It takes about an hour or two for the subtitles to appear. This has been uploaded for a couple of days now. I can tell that the subtitles are here quite easily by clicking on the subtitles button down here. You can turn them on and off there. So to get to the transcript, what you need to do is to look at these three buttons here, I'll zoom in for you on the screen. There they are. See those three dots? There's actually a little menu. So if you click on that, there's reports. Don't press that. That won't help. Go down to Open Transcript. Ka-ching. And there, as if by magic, on the top right hand corner of your YouTube page, you'll see it's even labeled transcript. It's quite clever this because when the video plays, everyone appreciates that. So I think the acts who are up for it you can see it scrolls for you. Now, what I did at first was to just drag my cursor down here. The trouble with this, as you can see, is that it's also capturing the time codes. So if I copy that and paste it into pages here on a Mac or into Word, if I paste that, you can see that it's brought up all of the times. There is a really easy way to get rid of that. Next to the word transcript, in that box on the top right hand corner, next to transcript, there's another three-dot menu. There's three dots for upwards. I wonder if that means something. If you click on that, it brings up the option for toggle timestamps. I think I'd like to call my third child toggle timestamps. But if you click on toggle timestamps, guess what? It toggles the timestamps. So all we need to do is scroll up to the top and I'm going to drag, clicking down on my mouse and just dragging all the way down to the final words, which I thank you, Philip. And then I'm going to hit copy, which for me is the command button and C, or you can right-click on your mouse, go down to copy. Then I go over to my word processor. Now, on the computer I'm on, it's a program called Pages. If you're on a PC, you might have a word processing program like Word. So I've pasted in the transcript and I don't know if you can see, but it has kept the sentences truncated, it's kept the lines truncated as almost as if they are appearing on a screen. And it's put some hard returns in these lines, which doesn't look very elegant. So you can take these out manually, but that will take forever because even on a short video, that's over a page worth. There's a quick way to do this. This was really difficult to find on Pages for Max. You might have stumbled on this video looking for how to remove hard returns or carriage returns on Mac pages. And the way to do it is this. If you click on Find, which is in the Edit menu, go down to Find and then click on Find. You'll see it's brought up another menu saying Find and Replace. Now what we're gonna look for is a special character. So we have to type in the coding for it and the button that you want to press is a backslash n. So here's the backslash, it looks like that. It's not the one underneath the question mark, which looks like that. It's the one that is under this weird line and it looks like that. And then the code letter is n. So backslash n, it's gonna find all of those. And you can see it's highlighted all of the carriage returns. Maybe n stands for new line, I don't know. But anyway, so it's backslash n. And then in the Replace line, I'm gonna hit space. I'll do it really loudly so you can hear me hitting the space bar. There you go. So it's gonna look for all of the carriage returns that it's highlighted and it's gonna replace them with a space. So if I hit Replace All, and as you can see, it's giving you a complete transcript that flows. Let me show you how to do that on Word. You paste the transcript from YouTube into a blank document. And similarly, you click on Find. Now the character, the code character we need to find here, it's like a hat sign. I'll show you a shot of that. On my keyboard, it's above the six. And then letter p, that means, I think it means new paragraph or paragraph return. All of those new line commands which are hidden in the text. If you go to Replace and just hit space once and then Replace All, it replaces all of those paragraph marks with a space. I wish I could find a way of doing this for Google Docs. I cannot find anywhere how to find the hidden code and replace it with a space. If you know how to do that in Google Docs, please, please, please leave me a comment. I've skipped over some assumptions here, like you know how to find the hidden characters. I found the invisibles. We're going to View and then down to Show Invisibles. There you go. But if you have any other questions, please leave me a comment. It'll be lovely to hear from you anyway. Just say hi. And I hope this helps you transcribe any video or any recording that you want and turn that into a transcription that you can use. If you have reached this point in the video, I hope this has helped. Give me a thumbs up. If you reached this point in the video, it'd be lovely to know someone reached this far. And if you're feeling even kinder, you don't have to watch any video of mine ever again. But if you hit the Subscribe button in the corner or on my face, it'll help us reach our cherished goal of hitting 1,000 subscribers. And good luck with your free transcribing. I hope this does the trick. And leave me a comment if it doesn't. Bye. Can you please help my daddy get 1,000 subscribers? Just click in the space. Thanks, bye. How was that?