What to do if a transcript is missing or incorrect
Step-by-step guide
Check if the video has captions on YouTube
YT Transcriber relies on caption data from YouTube. Open the video directly on YouTube.com, click the CC (Closed Captions) button on the player, and check if captions are available. If the CC button is greyed out or not present, the video does not have captions and cannot be transcribed at this time.
Check that the video is public
YT Transcriber can only process public videos. Private and unlisted videos will return an error. If the video was recently made public, wait a few minutes and try again as YouTube sometimes takes a moment to update its metadata.
Try re-transcribing the video
Open the video on your Dashboard, click the three-dot menu (⋯) on the video card, and select "Re-transcribe". This will submit a fresh transcription job, which may succeed if a previous attempt failed due to a temporary network issue.
Check for auto-generated vs manual captions
YouTube's auto-generated captions can sometimes be low quality for videos with strong accents, background noise, or technical vocabulary. If the transcript looks garbled, this is usually why. Manual captions (uploaded by the creator) tend to be more accurate.
Contact support if the problem persists
If re-transcribing does not help and the video has valid captions on YouTube, please contact our support team. Go to Settings > Help & Support and submit a ticket with the YouTube URL of the video. Our team will investigate and respond within one business day.
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