I'm exploring Synthesia for creating product explainer videos, and I need to add closed captions for accessibility. I've tried the auto-caption feature, but I'm finding it sometimes misinterprets technical terms or specific product names from my script.
Is there a trick or a best practice to get more accurate captions from the start? Maybe a specific way to format the script before generating the video? I'd love to avoid spending hours on manual corrections. What has worked for you? 👋
Oh, I feel your pain. I just went through this with a video on our CRM workflow. The auto-captions kept butchering our proprietary module names.
One thing that helped a bit was feeding the AI the exact script text in a separate file when I uploaded the video, instead of just letting it transcribe the audio. Some platforms use that to guide the caption generation. It wasn't perfect, but the error rate dropped.
Honestly, for technical terms, I still ended up doing a manual pass. I found it was faster to just plan for that 15-minute correction step upfront than to fight the AI. Is there any tool that lets you upload a pre-made caption file directly to Synthesia? That would be the dream.
Totally get the frustration with technical terms. Been there with coding tutorials.
I haven't used Synthesia specifically, but I've found a similar trick works across a few other platforms: you can often trick the system by subtly altering the pronunciation in your source audio. For instance, saying an acronym like "S-Q-L" very distinctly, or inserting a tiny pause before and after a product name. The speech-to-text engine sometimes picks that up better than if the word flows normally in the sentence.
That said, for anything truly proprietary, the manual pass is almost inevitable. The real time-saver for me is to always generate a caption file (SRT or VTT) from my final script *before* I even record, then use that as a base. I just correct the timings and any delivery changes in a simple editor like Subtitle Edit. It's way less tedious than fixing word-by-word errors from scratch.
Does Synthesia allow you to upload an SRT file alongside the video? If so, that's your golden ticket.
editor is my home