Auto-Captions Getting Words Wrong? Here's How to Fix It
Automatic transcription is very good at clear speech and predictably bad at everything else. Knowing which category your video falls into tells you whether to fix a couple of words or re-record.
Here is what trips it up, and what to do about each.
What speech engines actually get wrong
- Proper nouns. Brand names, product names and people's names have no reliable spelling to fall back on. Expect to fix these every time.
- Jargon and acronyms. Technical vocabulary outside everyday speech gets replaced with the nearest common word.
- Overlapping speakers. Two voices at once usually produces one garbled line rather than two clean ones.
- Background music. Music under speech measurably degrades accuracy, especially with lyrics.
- Numbers and units. Whether you get "fifteen" or "15", "£20" or "20 pounds" is inconsistent.
Record so there is less to fix
Accuracy is mostly decided before you hit record. Get the microphone within arm's length — a phone across the room picks up far more room noise than voice. Record voice clean and add music afterwards in the edit. Avoid hard rooms with bare walls, where reverb smears the consonants that the engine relies on.
Fixing what slips through
In Auto Captions, tap the word and retype it — the timing stays intact, so a corrected word stays synced to the moment it is spoken. You can also merge or split lines by changing how many words appear per line, which is usually the real fix when a caption feels wrong: the words were right, but the line broke in an awkward place.
Correct before you style. Editing text after positioning and sizing means redoing that work.
