I am not sure if you have struggled as much as I have with using YouTube videos to create English Language Teaching ("ELT") content. But let me share with you my woes, and in the process, perhaps you will learn something and will remember how to do it for the next time!

So the main issue I have is that often I need to get a transcript of a YouTube videos because my students may not get everything from just listening to the text, perhaps I want to have them read it, or I want to provide a transcript to the teachers who may end up using my content at a later stage... In any case, I need a transcript, but the transcript that I need from YouTube has a lot of time markers. And it lacks punctuation. It's completely impossible to use. And I'm literally struggling, hitting my head against the wall regarding what tools I can use in order to get a proper transcription of the text.

There are tons of them out their. Maestra as does HappyScribe seem to do a particularly good job, but they are paid for services. Eventually I stumbled on a free YouTube transcript generator - Gemoo, which provided reasonable transcription and uses a clean interface. 



But the problem is is that you still need to do a reasonable amount of editing. In this case I had a 50 minute panel discussion from YouTube that I wanted to transcribe - a lot of manual work if I wanted to do it myself. And ChatGPT just plays dumb and refuses to understand very simple instructions that he has clearly now come across before.

On the plus side, however, of all of this technological wandering in cyberspace, I stumbled across a website that amalgamates all the various AI tools that you may possibly want to use: Easy with AI.

Or! In my case - NOT so easy 😅

And I guess that is the whole point of my blog post here today. I need to submit to the fact that AI is here to stay (and here to help!) and I need to learn how to use it, even though it's not completely user friendly all the time. If I use the right tools in the right way I'm sure it will make my life a lot a lot easier. 

For example, to write this post I realize that with all of the writing that I will need to be doing, I need to focus on finding a speech to text app that will facilitate my work. So, this post was largely recorded by Speech Logger. It's pretty good, but only free for a certain amount of time. The search continues - I will need to find a new one. But I did like the freedom of thinking outloud and musing. 

Anyway it's back to work for me. Hope your lovely people are having a fantastic day! The weather outdoors is fabulous today! 🌞