Captions in Microsoft Stream
MS Stream makes video captions simple to help viewers who:
- Are unable to hear due to disability, trauma, or malfunctioning assistive devices.
- Do not have headphones or earbuds and can't turn sound on in their current location.
- Find it easier to focus or comprehend the video content by reading along.
This guide covers the caption option for viewers, accessing Stream features, and the transcript controls available to ensure your videos are accessible to all viewers.
Captions Option for Viewers
When you save a video to OneDrive or SharePoint, the audio in your video file is auto generated into a transcript in Stream. That transcript gives viewers the CC button in the Stream video player. It's important to know how to manage that transcript to ensure accurate captions.
Access Stream Features
Hold onto your hat for this one! Stream is a video player for all videos saved in OneDrive or SharePoint. However, when you upload your video to MS Stream, those videos are also saved to your OneDrive or SharePoint. This is inherently part of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Whether you saved to OneDrive, SharePoint, or Stream, open your videos in the Stream player to locate the control panel with all the feature options.
Transcript Controls
Once you're viewing a video in Stream, and have opened the Video Settings, you can generate, manage, and edit your transcript.
Generate a Transcript
To ensure your videos are captioned:
- Select the Transcript and captions option and click Generate.
- Select your video's language and click Generate again.
Select the language your video is predominately spoken in. If this language differs from those spoken in the video, the final transcript and captions may need to be edited and might contain errors.
If you see a Transcript button in your control panel, and don't see a Generate button, this means Microsoft handled generation for you.
While your captions and transcript are generated, you can check the progress via the Transcripts and captions tab. Once they're done, you'll see an 'On' switch next to the video language.
Depending on the length of your video, captions can take seconds to several minutes to generate. You do not need to monitor the process and can close the tab and/or video and come back later.
Manage a Transcript
In the Transcript and captions tab, you can click the three dots to download your video transcript, replace the current transcript, or delete it.
Edit a Transcript
It's important to review your transcript for accuracy to have quality captions in your videos. This is due to the occasional issue of automatic generation getting phrases, acronyms, terminology, or pronunciation wrong,
- Click the Transcript menu on your video page after generation is complete.
- Hover over a block of text and click the Edit button
- Make your changes and click the Done button
