Not only are captions and transcripts a critical aspect of accessibility, but they also help make longer form content more digestible for your audience. Wistia captions are also searchable, allowing viewers to jump to any point in the media via the transcript.

Whether you’re trying to make sure people can get the message of your media (even without the sound), looking to expand your viewer base with multilingual captions, or just searching for a little more love in the media SEO department, they’re a great addition to your content.

Captions display all audible dialogue in real time and are only visible on the video player itself. Transcripts are a time coded log of all dialogue in a media and are available on all media.

Captions and transcripts exist in unison in Wistia. In other words, edits made to the transcript will be applied to the captions and vice versa.

Captions and transcripts can be generated or uploaded directly on your Wistia media page. Below the video player, open the Transcript tab and select Generate Transcript.

If you'd like transcripts to be ordered automatically for all new media uploads, the Account Owner can enable this feature on the Account page in their account settings.

Professional transcripts are human-reviewed and have a 99% accuracy rate. By default, they'll be completed within 4 business days, though you may opt to receive the order within one business day at an additional cost.

Automated, computer-generated transcripts have a 95% accuracy rate and are completed in minutes. This is a great option for reducing costs if you don't mind making your own edits.

We’ll send you an email from alerts@wistia.com to let you know when the transcript is ready.

If you have an existing SRT or VTT file for your video, open up the ellipsis menu and select the "Upload Transcript" option. You can upload as many transcript files as you'd like.

From here, drag and drop files or click "Select files." We'll automatically detect the language and notify you of any formatting errors upon uploading.

Once uploaded and validated, click "Save."

If you’re working with multilingual captions, we’ll supply the captions that match the language of your viewer’s browser. If those captions aren’t available, we’ll serve English captions by default.

The transcript will also be injected into the metadata of your media when using the Standard Embed. To learn more about SEO, check out our help page.

If certain words in your media might be more difficult to transcribe (e.g., acronyms, industry terms, product names), you can add a list of keywords to your account. Scroll down to the Transcription Keywords section of the Account page in your account settings to add known terms for computer-generated transcripts.

Once complete, scroll down and click Save Settings.

Once you've added a transcript to your media, you'll have the option to enable captions by default for your viewers. In the Customize panel on your media page, open the Controls tab to configure captions to be on or off by default.

If enabled by default, captions will be visible on the screen for all viewers. If set to off by default, viewers will need to enable captions manually via the CC button in the play bar.

Click Edit to correct any spelling or transcript errors. Click Save to apply your changes to the transcript and captions.

Open the ellipsis menu to upload a new transcript, upgrade a transcript, download a transcript, generate chapters with AI, or correct the timing of the captions.

Need to adjust the timing of words or phrases in your captions? Click on the ellipsis menu and select Correct captions timing to open the editor.

From here, you can move words around your timeline as necessary, extend how long they’ll display, and customize any line breaks in the text.

Select a specific word to adjust it, or click your desired point in the timeline.

The bars above each group of text can be used to control the following:

The carriage return icon can be dragged to determine where line breaks should appear.

If you make any mistakes, click Undo or Redo. To remove a line break, select it and click Delete. Click the keyboard to view keyboard shortcuts.

If you have transcript files in multiple languages, you can select which one you’d like to edit as well. Click into the dropdown menu to select your desired language.

To exit the captions editor without making changes, click Cancel. If you’re ready to save your changes, click Save.

Customize viewer caption settings to match your brand, increase accessibility, and ensure that captions aren't blocking any important information in your video.

To customize caption settings, click into the captions menu from the playbar, and select "Caption settings."

Here, you can adjust a number of different settings for how your captions display in your video.

You can adjust:

When you adjust your captions' settings, they will automatically save. If you change your mind, scroll down to the bottom of the modal to "Reset to defaults."

Interactive transcripts allow viewers to navigate to different parts of your media by scrolling through or searching the captions file. Open the captions menu from the play bar and select “Search Video" to search for keywords or phrases.

Below a media, the transcript will also highlight each word as it is spoken. Click on any word to navigate to that point of the media.

To create a new translation of your transcript from directly within Wistia, click the language dropdown menu and select "Manage localizations."

From here, select to create a dubbed version of your video, or select "Text translations only." Search for or select your desired language from the dropdown menu and then click "Create text translation."

You can then select which language you’d like to view as captions in your video by clicking the captions icon on the play bar.

You can order a dubbed version of your video (which includes the translated transcript and captions). Check out this page to learn about ordering a dubbed version of your videos.

When downloading a video on the media page, an "Include available captions" checkbox will be available for any existing transcripts. Check this option to download an asset with captions. Uncompressed media files cannot be downloaded with captions.

Open the downloaded file in your media player of choice and select the captions track you'd like to display.

On a media's page, in the download modal, you can download a transcript file. Click into the "Transcript" tab, select which language you'd like to download, (you'll need to download each language separately if you have multiple) and choose your desired file format:

When viewers enable captions and select a language on a video, their selections will be saved for all future viewing sessions on the same domain. With these preferences saved, viewers will only need to enable captions once in a learning course, video series, or a Wistia Channel. Captions settings will not persist across other browsers or devices.

When you delete the translation of a video, both the transcript and captions in that language will be deleted. In order to do so, in the dropdown menu of the Transcript section, select "Manage localizations."

In the "Manage localizations" modal, click the three dots menu and then select "Delete." Confirm your decision in the pop-up window.

Once done, that language will be removed from your video.