How do you feel when you're scrolling through Facebook and you unexpectedly start hearing sound from a video playing. If you hate it, you're part of the 80 per cent of users that react badly to these unexpected videos with sound. So about a year ago Facebook brought out a tool that automatically created captions for video ads.
Guess what? Now they are extending this feature to all videos published by Pages.
If you want to share a video you know it can be very difficult for it to make sense without sound, especially if you want to get a marketing message across.
In the past to create subtitles you would have to create a text file with the captions, save it as a SRT file and import it into Facebook. Three months ago in October, Facebook started rolling out its auto-captioning feature to more and more Pages. Today many have it - although mine is lacking the new feature.
How the automatic captioning works is Facebook uses its voice-recognition software. I know, you're thinking uh-oh. From what I've read, in most cases, it gets it perfectly right.
However you can of course review and edit the automatically generated captions before publishing your video.
A huge plus is you can also add auto-captions to videos that you have already published.
How to find out if you have it - and to use auto-captions. Click on videos in your Facebook page. Click on one of your videos. Above it to the right you'll see 3 little dots. Click them and select Edit (or edit post). An edit video box opens. You'll see Basic, Captions, Advanced. Select Captions. If you have the new feature, you'll see a third option under captions called Generate with a little wond (Third after video captions, upload SRT File.
Isn't it amazing. All this free technology at our fingertips.