speech to text premiere pro 2023

Try Speech to Text — available now in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Automatically generate a transcript and add captions to your videos to improve accessibility and boost engagement with Speech to Text. Download the latest version of Premiere Pro today and enjoy access to the powerful feature set, free with your Creative Cloud membership.

Explore the power of Speech to Text.

Experience cutting-edge transcription.

Speech to Text transcribes spoken dialog to text with industry leading accuracy in an instant.

Enjoy automatic caption creation.

Auto Captions, powered by Adobe Sensei, offers a seamless experience from audio transcription to caption or subtitle creation.

Review and edit to perfect your work.

Editing your transcript or captions is as easy as playing back your video. Search, merge, or split text to ensure a perfect read.

Create in more than a dozen languages.

Speech to Text is powered for English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Chinese, Hindi, and more.

A special thank you to everyone who participated in the early access program.

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• Premiere Pro

AI Assistance: Boost Engagement for Free with Premiere Pro’s Speech-to-Text

• Posted by Laurence Grayson
• September 20, 2021
• Updated December 17, 2023

If you watched the launch videos at Adobe MAX 2020 you probably noticed a few trends forming during the product demos.

Mobile and social were (and always will be) focal points, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)—or Sensei as Adobe has chosen to brand them—took the stage in a number of surprising ways.

As always, a lot of the airtime was given over to Photoshop, which added a bundle of Sensei-driven tools called Neural Filters that include image upscaling, sky replacement, and portrait aging. But while turning the clock forward on your face is fun, and swapping that blown-out skyline with a stock sunset makes a landscape prettier, it’s hard to see much commercial value in these tools. For that, you should be looking at the least talked-about AI feature in Premiere Pro—Speech-to-Text.

Let’s take a look at why you might want it, how you might use it, and whether or not this machine learning tool can augment your productivity .

We don’t talk about that

Let’s take a moment to recall that this is not Adobe’s first attempt at releasing a tool for converting recorded audio into editable text. Speech Analysis was added to Premiere Pro back in 2013. It was…not great.

When I tested it back then, the best description for the results it produced would be word salad .

But to be fair, the same was also true of other software at that time. Google’s auto-transcription for YouTube videos was just as unreliable. As one commenter put it “in my experience it does such a bad job that the time it’d take me to correct it is considerably more than the time it’d take me to transcribe it myself.”

And that, in a nutshell, was the problem. So it wasn’t really surprising that Adobe pulled Speech Analysis from public release in 2014, and stayed silent on the matter until the fabulous Jason Levine brought it back into the spotlight in 2020.

Different strokes

The motivation for automatically generating captions is likely to depend on your business perspective.

For example, companies like Google and Facebook want it because it makes video indexable and searchable, allowing us to find content inside videos (and for them to sell ad slots based on the context).

But for video producers and distributors, the need for captions is probably coming from a different place .

Accessibility

The laws around accessibility are different across the world, but the closest we have to a global standard are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It’s worth noting that section 7.3 of the current WCAG indicates that media without captions is deemed a critical error that automatically fails the rating process.

In the US, the FCC has already made it a legal requirement that all TV content broadcast in America must be closed captioned, and any subsequent streaming of this content falls under the same rules .

And while it’s true that content that is uniquely broadcast over the Internet falls outside of these regulations, legislation including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has already been successfully used as the basis for lawsuits against streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu.

So these days it’s probably safer to assume that captions are required by law in the country/state where you operate than to find out the hard way.

Social Media

While meeting accessibility requirements is an excellent justification for captioning, it’s also beneficial to audiences who don’t suffer from hearing loss, especially when it comes to video in social media.

Muted autoplay is quickly becoming the norm for video in scrolling social feeds, and it’s estimated that as much as 85 percent of video views are taking place with the sound turned off. So if you want to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of your social media content, captions are now an essential part of the process.

It’s estimated that as much as 85 percent of video views are taking place with the sound turned off.

Global reach

And for those of us working with global markets, it’s long been known that captions are the easiest way to repurpose your film and video content for audiences who speak a different language. (Certainly a lot less involved than dubbing and ADR .)

While some translation services can work directly from the original media, offering a caption file in the original language can help to speed the process up.

There are, of course, other reasons why captions are quickly becoming an essential component of media production, and it’s not just because of the memes.

pic.twitter.com/qF5PZ3iABp — no context the good place (@nocontexttgp) April 26, 2021

But while the needs might change from business to business, the fundamental benefit is the same—captioning your media will help you reach a larger audience. And that’s good for everyone .

Let’s start the show

To get started, open the project to be captioned in Premiere Pro and have the target sequence active in the Timeline view.

Depending on how you’ve structured your edit, a small amount of preparation might be beneficial before moving forward.

For example, if you’ve laid out multiple vocals on separate tracks, or if you have a mix of vocals and SFX/music on the same track, you should spend some time tagging vocal clips as Dialogue using the Essential Sound Panel (you can also choose to mute any unwanted tracks on the Timeline if that’s easier.) This will let Premiere Pro know which assets to include in the exported audio that it analyzes later on.

Also, if you don’t want to create captions for the entire sequence, you should set sequence In and Out points by moving the playhead to the required positions and hitting the I and O keys respectively. (Note that the Work Area Bar isn’t used for this feature.)

When you’re ready, open the Text window (Window->Text) and hit the Transcribe sequence button.

Your options at this point are straightforward. You can choose to export a mixdown of just the clips you’ve tagged as Dialogue, you can pick Mix to create a mixdown of the entire sequence, or you can select a specific track to export from the drop-down menu.

At present, there’s no way to select multiple audio tracks for the mixdown, which could be irksome if you have multiple speakers on separate tracks. For now, just mute the tracks you don’t want to include and choose the Mix option.

Speech-to-Text supports an impressive selection of languages that covers most of the world’s population. Notable exceptions are Arabic, Bengali, and Indonesian, but it’s interesting to see both US and UK variants of English. (As a UK ex-pat living in Australia, the latter scores bonus points with me.) However, I can only comment on the effectiveness of the tool in English.

It’s interesting to note that Sensei’s ability to identify different speakers—which was the default behavior in the beta—now requires consent, and isn’t available in Illinois, presumably due to privacy concerns.

The transcription process is relatively fast, with a four-minute test project featuring dual speakers taking around two minutes, and an hour-long sequence taking 24min, which indicates a turnaround time of about half the runtime.

But Speech-to-Text is (mostly) cloud-based and it’s impossible to predict what speeds might be like if the entire Adobe Creative Cloud membership suddenly starts chewing up Sensei’s compute cycles at the same time. That said, even if job queuing becomes necessary, you and your workstation will at least be free to make that coffee or catch up with other tasks in the meantime.

Get back to work

When Sensei is finished with your audio, the Transcript tab of the Text panel will be populated with the results.

And while your mileage may vary, I have to say that I was impressed with the accuracy of the tests I ran. The beta version that I first tested was good—the public version is even better.

By opting into speaker profiling, Sensei recognizes multiple speakers, identifying them as Speaker 1, Speaker 2, etc. If you opt-out, then it will simply list Unknown next to the paragraph segments.

Either way, you can name them by clicking on the ellipsis in the left column of the Transcript tab and selecting Edit Speakers.

This tool can let you manually fix instances where Sensei may have incorrectly identified speakers with similar-sounding voices, and it’s worth taking the time to do this now before moving onto the caption creation stage.

The same is true for transcript cleanup. Unless you’ve been extremely fortunate with your Speech-to-Text analysis, there will be errors in your transcript. These are more likely in recordings with a more conversational delivery, background noise, non-dictionary words like company names, or multiple speakers talking across each other.

Unless you’ve been extremely fortunate with your Speech-to-Text analysis, there will be errors in your transcript.

And while you’ll be able to edit the text after it’s converted to captions, you should correct the transcript before you get to the next step. This is because Premiere Pro treats the transcript and subsequent captions as separate data sources—so making changes to one will have no effect on the other.

So take the time to get your transcript right as it will be the source from which all of your captions will be created.

Getting around

Adobe has implemented some extremely useful features to help you navigate the video and transcript at the same time.

To begin with, Premiere Pro already has a Captions workspace that divides your screen into Text, Essential Graphics , Timeline, Project Bins, and Program. Though you might want to tweak things to suit your preference. For me, it looks like this…

Once you’re set up, finding your way around is straightforward.

For example, moving the playhead to a new position in the timeline will automatically cue the transcript to the corresponding location, to the extent that the word being spoken at that point beneath the playhead is highlighted blue in the Transcript panel. Any text that lies ahead of the playhead position is colored gray, which is a helpful addition to the UX.

Similarly, playing or scrubbing the timeline will update the transcript view to keep pace with the playhead.

And it also works in reverse, so selecting any word in the Transcript panel will automatically move the playhead and video preview to the corresponding time in the sequence. It can be a little slow to respond at times—possibly because it’s talking to Adobe’s servers—but it’s a highly effective approach, nonetheless.

There’s also a Search box in the top corner, which lets you jump to words and phrases in the transcript, as well as a Replace function should you need to fix repeated errors.

Best practice

At this stage, you’ll probably do most of your navigation in the Transcript panel; selecting a word, hitting Space to start playback, comparing what you’re hearing with what you’re reading, then stopping and double-clicking on the text to make any changes.

Based on my experience, your changes will most likely center on punctuation and sentence structure, rather than fixing incorrect words. And despite Sensei’s best efforts, you’ll still need to put in the work to get things to a caption-ready state.

And this is to be expected. Natural language processing is incredibly hard. After you factor in accents, dialect, mannerisms, tone, and emphasis, even human beings struggle with it. So expecting perfect results from a machine is unrealistic. (I’d strongly recommend you turn YouTube’s automatic captions on for the following video example.)

(This is a great alternative – https://youtu.be/Gib916jJW1o )

So approach this stage with an open mind, a fresh cup of coffee, and a comfy chair. And if you need guidance on the best practices for caption creation, you might want to read through the BBC’s subtitle guidelines , first.

Also, remember that the transcript data is saved in the Premiere Pro project file, so you can come back to it later if you need to. You can also export the transcript as a separate, but proprietary .prtranscript file, though it’s not clear what the benefit of this approach might be.

When you’re confident that your transcript is as clean as you can make it, then go ahead and hit the Create captions button.

You’ll be given a bunch of options here, including the ability to apply Styles (assuming that you’ve previously created some). You can define the maximum character length and minimum duration of your captions, set them to Double or Single line, and even the number of frames you want to insert between them.

If you’re not sure what you want at this stage, I’d suggest that you pick the “Subtitle” format from the drop-down, make sure that the Create from sequence transcript radio button is selected, and leave the rest at their default values.

I’m not going to spend a great deal of time discussing the different caption formats that Speech-to-Text offers. Partly because I’m not an expert in the differences, and you’ll know your project requirements better than I do. But mostly because it doesn’t matter that much .

This is because Premiere Pro’s Speech-to-Text keeps your transcript data intact and adds your captions to a separate track in the sequence timeline. (This is a huge improvement over Premiere Pro’s first attempt at captions, which incorporated the caption track into the video layer.)

Thanks to this, you can generate captions in as many different formats as you need. Even retroactively, should your project get sold into a territory that uses a different standard. There doesn’t appear to be a limit on how many caption tracks you can add, and the format used for each caption track is clearly labeled.

If things start to get cluttered, you can toggle track visibility using the CC button in the timeline view.

If you’re working with foreign language captions, this aspect of the UI could be extremely useful, as it has the potential to let you build caption layers for as many languages as you need in the same sequence timeline . There are limitations to this approach, which I’ll get to later, but speaking from personal experience, I welcome this wholeheartedly.

So go ahead and hit that Create button, and watch as your transcript is chunked up and laid out in the format of your choice.

Another round

If you have any experience in caption creation, you’ll know that good captions require a surprising amount of finesse.

It’s not as simple as breaking the dialogue into sentences and showing them on-screen for as long as it takes the speaker to say them.

Punctuation is incredibly important, and line breaks can mean the difference between comprehension and confusion.

You have to deconstruct what’s spoken into short, intelligible sections that can be read without drawing too much attention away from the visuals. Punctuation is incredibly important, and line breaks can mean the difference between comprehension and confusion. And to be fair, Speech-to-Text seems to do a reasonable job of this.

However, to comply with captioning standards like the FCC’s, you need to convey noise and music to the fullest extent possible . And while it’s unreasonable to expect Sensei to start labeling noises and music (for now, at least), your captioning software should allow you to incorporate information beyond dialogue.

One at a time, please

Unfortunately, Speech-to-Text is limited to a single track with no scope for overlapping elements.

This means that there’s no way to easily incorporate simultaneous speakers or add sound or music identifiers over dialogue. (I tried adding these to a second caption track, but you can only enable visibility for one track at a time.)

So if FCC compliance is needed for your project, then you might need to hand this job off to a different caption solution. But even then, you could still use Speech-to-Text to get you most of the way, then export the results to a text or SRT (SubRip) file for import into a different tool.

Split the difference

Once you get down to the business of editing the captions generated by Speech-to-Text, Premiere Pro’s workflow makes a lot of sense.

Sentences are broken into short, single-line segments that will fit on even the smallest of screens without line-wrapping. And you can choose to merge or split these further if they don’t quite work in their current state.

Adding new captions is also possible, assuming that there’s space to do so (the default for the inserted caption is three seconds, and you can end up overwriting existing captions if you’re not careful here). 

Captions also behave like any other asset in the timeline. So you can adjust their In and Out points by dragging clip handles, link them to video clips, split them with the Razor tool, or even perform slip, slide, ripple, and roll edits. 

So if you already know your way around the Premiere Pro toolset, your existing skills will stand you in good stead here.

Fixing it in post-post

There is, however, a track editing limitation that’s unique to captions.

While you can select and manipulate multiple video, audio, or image tracks at the same time, only one caption track can be active at any time. If you need to adjust multiple caption tracks in different formats, you’ll have to do it one track at a time.

But this feels like splitting hairs. Given that the captioning process typically takes place long after the edit is locked and approved, the need to make changes across multiple caption formats should be a fringe scenario.

Open or closed?

Premiere Pro offers a wide range of formatting tools for your captions, including the ability to save styles and apply them to future projects.

You can adjust font, color, shadow, outline, and background options, as well as position, text alignment, and usable caption area. And these can be assigned to individual captions, or across the entire caption track.

Closed captioning

But the extent to which you can change the appearance of your captions depends on whether you intend to deploy them as open or closed .

Closed captions are stored as separate files—also known as sidecar files—and can be toggled on and off by the viewer during playback.

Most of the formatting for closed captions is handled by the playback system, so formatting options are limited (and Premiere Pro will only display functions that are supported by your chosen caption format). But, despite the name, closed captions are easier to change after being finalized as they’re usually a simple text or XML file.

Open captioning

In contrast, open captions are “burnt in” to the video, so they’re always visible (regardless of the playback platform or device) and you can format them however you see fit.

It also means that you can create a single version of the captioned video that will play on all video platforms.

But the trade-off here is that your captions can’t be changed without re-rendering and redistributing the entire video. And, if you’re working with multiple languages, you’d have to create entirely new videos for each language instead of a more manageable set of caption tracks.

It’s also worth noting that open captions will resize along with the video, so if your audience is looking at a piece of 16×9 media in portrait view on a mobile device, there’s a chance that your captions might become too small to read.

On this basis, you might think there’d be no compelling reason to opt for open captions on your video content. But if you’re publishing to social media, then you might not want to rely on the automatic captioning tools that are currently your only option on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

Also, some social platforms only allow you to add captions at the same time as you upload the video, which makes scheduling or auto-posting video content with captions impossible. So open captioning can still be a viable option.

Finishing up

Looking at the current version, it seems as though your export options have been reduced to  EBU N19 or plain text SubRip SRT file—the MacCaption VANC MCC format and Embed in output file option found in the beta are no longer available.

This isn’t as limiting as it sounds, though, as EBU serves most streaming and broadcast services, and SRT covers most online and social video platforms.

What we’re not seeing is the ability to export only the caption track from Premiere Pro’s export tool or Adobe Media Encoder, so you need to render out at least an audio file in order to get an XML caption file.

Given that you can export to .srt and .txt files from the Captions panel, this seems odd, and seems likely to change in the future.

If you want open captions, you can just pick the Burn Captions Into Video option. And of course, if you want to create multiple exports in different formats, you can queue them up in Adobe Media Encoder for batch export. Just make sure that you set the required caption track’s visibility in the timeline first.

What’s missing?

While testing the beta, I noted some areas where Adobe might improve this tool before releasing it to the public and, with one small exception, they’re still “missing.” So here’s my wishlist:

• Adjustable font size in the Transcript and Captions panels. The text size is currently defined by the system settings, and there are times I wanted to dial the font size up to make things easier to read while editing the transcript.
• Script import. If you’re working with scripted material, then Speech-to-Text could, in theory, skip the transcription process and focus on timing, instead. This would allow you to quickly convert what you already have into a caption-ready format. (YouTube already has this.)
• Custom formatting based on speaker. While you can identify the speakers in the transcript, there’s no way to automatically add that data to your captions. And if you’re captioning scene by scene, it might be useful to have custom caption placement for speakers who are always going to be on a particular side of the frame.

But is it worth it?

I can’t say what your experience with Premiere Pro’s Speech-to-Text might be.

Is it one-button automation for all your captioning needs? Of course not. And I believe we’re still a long way from building a system that can handle this complex and infinitely variable task without some kind of human intervention.

But for me, this tool became a standard inclusion in my toolkit before it even left beta.

If pressed, I’d estimate that it’s cut the time it takes to caption content to about a third of what it was before . It’s not the only option available— Otter.ai will export transcripts to the .srt caption format, Digital Anarchy has a Premiere Pro plugin called Transcriptive , and of course, you can pay companies to do the job for you—but all of these have a cost component, while Speech-to-Text is currently free to use.

It all comes back to that comment I included at the beginning of this article—is it easier to use Speech-to-Text than it would be to transcribe it yourself? For me, the answer is a very firm yes. So if you’re looking at finding a better way to add accessibility and greater audience engagement to your video projects, Premiere Pro Speech-to-Text is definitely worth a look.

(And if you’re looking for more content on working with audio in Premiere Pro, check out Premiere Pro Mixing Basics and Premiere Pro Audio Tools .)

Laurence Grayson

After a career spanning [mumble] years and roles that include creative lead, video producer, tech journalist, designer, and envelope stuffer, Laurence is now the managing editor for Frame.io Insider. This has made him enormously happy, but he's British, so it's very hard to tell.

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Text to Speech in Premiere Pro: Revolutionizing Video Editing

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Embracing the Future with Text to Speech in Premiere ProAdobe Premiere Pro, a frontrunner in video editing software, has integrated advanced features like...

Adobe Premiere Pro, a frontrunner in video editing software, has integrated advanced features like text to speech, enhancing the workflow for video editors globally. This article delves into how this feature, along with Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, is transforming video editing.

The Basics of Text to Speech in Premiere Pro

Text to speech in Premiere Pro allows editors to convert written text into spoken words within their projects. This feature is a boon for creating voiceovers, subtitles, and enhancing the accessibility of content.

Consider a documentary filmmaker who needs to add narration. Using text to speech, they can generate a voiceover without a recording studio, saving time and resources.

Premiere Pro's speech to text capability works hand in hand with text to speech. It transcribes spoken words into text, which can then be converted back into speech, facilitating a seamless editing process.

An editor working on a multilingual project can transcribe dialogue in Spanish, then use text to speech to create an English voiceover .

Adobe Premiere Pro's text to speech function streamlines the video editing workflow. It's especially beneficial for creating captions and subtitles, crucial for social media platforms like TikTok.

• Open Premiere Pro and select the text panel.
• Type your script or import a text file.
• Choose the desired language and voice.
• Apply the text to speech command to generate audio.

Premiere Pro supports various languages, including English, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish, French, and German, making it an invaluable tool in global filmmaking.

A German filmmaker can create an English version of their film using text to speech, significantly expanding their audience reach.

Text to speech in Premiere Pro works seamlessly with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications like After Effects, Photoshop, and Audition, offering an integrated post-production environment.

The use of plugins and presets in Premiere Pro allows for customization in text to speech, offering unique voices and modulation options. This is useful in creating distinct character dialogues in storytelling.

Adobe's Sensei, an artificial intelligence framework, powers the text to speech feature in Premiere Pro. It continuously learns and improves, offering more natural and accurate voice renditions.

The integration of AI and machine learning in video editing tools like Premiere Pro is revolutionizing the industry, making processes like creating captions and voiceovers more efficient and less time-consuming.

Adobe Premiere Pro's text to speech feature represents a significant leap in video editing technology. Its integration into the video editor's toolkit simplifies complex tasks, enhances creativity, and opens new avenues in filmmaking and content creation.

Cost : Free to try

Speechify Text to Speech is a groundbreaking tool that has revolutionized the way individuals consume text-based content. By leveraging advanced text-to-speech technology, Speechify transforms written text into lifelike spoken words, making it incredibly useful for those with reading disabilities, visual impairments, or simply those who prefer auditory learning. Its adaptive capabilities ensure seamless integration with a wide range of devices and platforms, offering users the flexibility to listen on-the-go.

Top 5 Speechify TTS Features :

High-Quality Voices : Speechify offers a variety of high-quality, lifelike voices across multiple languages. This ensures that users have a natural listening experience, making it easier to understand and engage with the content.

Seamless Integration : Speechify can integrate with various platforms and devices, including web browsers, smartphones, and more. This means users can easily convert text from websites, emails, PDFs, and other sources into speech almost instantly.

Speed Control : Users have the ability to adjust the playback speed according to their preference, making it possible to either quickly skim through content or delve deep into it at a slower pace.

Offline Listening : One of the significant features of Speechify is the ability to save and listen to converted text offline, ensuring uninterrupted access to content even without an internet connection.

Highlighting Text : As the text is read aloud, Speechify highlights the corresponding section, allowing users to visually track the content being spoken. This simultaneous visual and auditory input can enhance comprehension and retention for many users.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, Adobe Premiere Pro supports text to speech. This feature allows you to convert written text into spoken audio within your video projects.

To use speech to text in Premiere Pro, open your project, navigate to the text panel, select your audio file, and then use the 'Transcribe Sequence' feature to convert speech in the audio to text.

To make text appear as you speak in Premiere Pro, first transcribe your speech to text using the 'Transcribe Sequence' feature. Then, use the 'Create Captions' option to sync the text with your speech.

Yes, Premiere Pro can transcribe audio to text. This is done through its speech to text feature, which is useful for creating subtitles or closed captions.

Adobe offers text to speech functionality in several of its products, including Adobe Premiere Pro, part of the Creative Cloud suite.

Yes, Adobe Premiere Pro includes a speech to text feature. This tool is helpful for transcribing dialog in videos and automating the creation of subtitles.

While "best" is subjective, Adobe Premiere Pro is highly regarded for its text to speech capability, especially for video editors. It’s integrated with Adobe's advanced artificial intelligence technology, Adobe Sensei.

Yes, Premiere Pro supports text to speech. This feature is a part of its expansive toolkit, aiding in efficient video editing and post-production workflows.

Text to speech in Premiere Pro is a feature that converts written text into spoken voiceovers. It utilizes Adobe Sensei’s machine learning for natural-sounding speech in various languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Hindi.

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Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.

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Review: Adobe’s Speech to Text Inside of Premiere Pro

By Brady Betzel

Adobe Creative Cloud July 2021 has a few very intriguing updates. Before I jump into what is updated in Premiere, let’s touch on the After Effects beta. As of July 20, it now contains support for multi-frame rendering, which provides much faster processing power. Adobe is still in the process of porting over many of the effects that embrace the power of multi-frame rendering, as well as many third-party effects plugins. One of my favorite After Effects updates is the Render Queue Notification via the Creative Cloud app. Remember the old “Render Coffee or Smoke Break?” Imagine that but with very precise timing.

Premiere: Transcriptions and Captions Since I mainly work in video, the Premiere Pro July 2021 transcription and captioning updates are what grabbed most of my attention. First, credit where credit is due — I cynically thought that Adobe would release alternate pricing for users of the Sensei-backed transcription workflow, but to my surprise, it is 100% free for Creative Cloud subscribers. Nice.

Adobe is appropriately calling this update “Speech to Text,” and it is fast. Essentially, the latest Premiere Pro update has added the ability to transcribe video and audio clips via the Creative Cloud. And for those wondering, yes, it uploads your audio to a server for processing.

For Avid Media Composer users, one of their issues with Premiere Pro was the lack of a “ScriptSync” equivalent. With Speech to Text, Adobe has jumped the line by natively including this feature. Not only can you use a similar workflow for editing by searching transcriptions for specific words or speakers, but you no longer need to use third-party transcriptions — it is all built into Premiere. This is a very big deal. Many users will see this and say, “Cool, I can add captions to my videos when I upload to YouTube or another service, which will in turn improve accessibility and search engine optimization.” But for editors who must scour many hours of interviews, including transcriptions of clips, this is a godsend — most importantly because it is natively supported inside of the Premiere Pro interface.

I tested the transcription/captioning workflow to see for myself if it really worked, and it did. I was very impressed. I had a 44-minute-long clip with multiple speakers that I wanted to transcribe (and possibly edit, if Adobe Sensei misinterpreted any speech). First, I didn’t find any errors, which is kind of nuts considering the clip I transcribed featured a unique bird species. Second, it took under 15 minutes to upload the audio, transcribe and place the text in my timeline. Amazing.

Because the system I learned when I first started my career was Media Composer, I had to try porting a script over to Avid. It was also easy. There is a drop-down menu to export a TXT or SRT file. I downloaded the TXT file, imported it as a script into Media Composer, ran ScriptSync and bam! It worked. Now there are a few things to keep in mind: You may want to edit the numbers on the side of the script if they bother you and take a look at Avid’s ScriptSync workflow . But overall, using Premiere Pro as a transcription service is a valuable tool. I’m sure someone will make a script to format properly at some point, but it works right out of the box. It’s probably not what Adobe had hoped for, but if you use multiple editing systems, this is a great tool to have.

Final Thoughts In the end, Adobe is making huge strides with After Effects, Character Animator, the new Substance 3D collection and Premiere Pro. Smaller updates to the Premiere Pro beta, like the updated vectorscope, could easily be overlooked in favor of larger ones like Speech to Text, but they deserve a look as well.

Speech to Text is a tremendous tool for transcriptions, captions and general accessibility for everyone from broadcast video editors to content creators wanting to add subtitles to their videos.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and Uninterrupted: The Shop . He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff .

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Speaker 1: This is a quick tutorial on closed captions in Premiere Pro 2023. I will bring in my media and load this into the timeline. I will check in the workspaces to make sure that closed captions is selected. I will also check that text is selected. Once those are selected, you should be able to see text and transcript. I will transcribe the sound in the timeline. It's in English. I'm selecting audio on the track and transcribe. Because this is a useful tool in documentary filmmaking, I have various options of exporting this. I can export the transcript. I will also download a text file. And finally, I will export. I will export the CSV file and save. Once I've created the transcript, I simply click on this closed caption button. And it brings up a window if I want to create the captions. With subtitle default, I could put preferences, but I'm going to put it here. I will select this. And now the closed captions are created. You can see they're on the screen. I will export several versions of this file. Here's the media. I'm going to change my location and put this on to, into my closed caption exports. The first one is, we'll just simply save. So here under captions, I have the option to burn the captions into video. And I will export that video. It's now exporting a video with the captions burned in. I will also go to the export window again. And I will change the setting to export, create subtitles. And I will go to export, create sidecar file. This will create just an mp4 file going out along with the sidecar file. It's going to go into the same folder. So inside of the exports folder, we can see if we use the column view, we have.

Speaker 2: A few times on this and you'll hardly remember we had this.

Speaker 1: So that doesn't have the closed captions. This one does have closed captions.

Speaker 2: A few times on this and you'll hardly remember we had this conversation.

Speaker 1: You can see the closed captions here. In this folder, we also have the SRT, the CSV file, and the text file that we downloaded along with the transcript.

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how do i install speech to text language pack for premiere pro 2023?

i have the latest premiere pro 2023 installed from monkrus and i clicked autoplay.exe to install it. yet when i try to transcribe some audio, it keeps getting stuck. how do i fix this? thank you

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