Manual captioning is expensive, slow, and—let’s be honest—nobody’s favorite task. Yet compliance standards, global audiences, and search-engine discoverability make high-quality transcripts and subtitles non-negotiable. Zype’s first AI-powered product release introduces on-demand transcription and subtitle generation for every video in your library—new uploads and back-catalog alike.
Why are accurate transcriptions and subtitles important for my video workflows?
There are many reasons why it is beneficial to have accurate transcriptions and subtitles for all of the video assets in your library. Ensuring that your video is accessible to all audiences is now required by organizations like ADA and the FCC, and important to have if you want to avoid paying penalties. Not only does having these supporting elements help you meet accessibility and compliance standards, but it can more importantly help you increase the reach of your video content by enabling better SEO and discoverability of your content. In making video transcripts available, you open the door to allowing search engines to index text associated with your videos that makes every line of dialogue searchable. Making subtitles available for your videos increases the global reach and impact of your video content. Viewers increasingly expect subtitles as a baseline for content consumption across digital platforms, and adding them can help you boost watch time across different regions and devices. Lastly, having subtitle captions produced as an initial step in your video workflow allows you to avoid needing to retrofit captions which can be costly.
Introducing Zype’s AI-Powered Transcriptions & Subtitle Generation
Using Zype’s new AI-powered tools to produce transcriptions and subtitles for your video content library can help you avoid incurring unnecessary costs and wasting time later on to perform similar tasks.
Within Zype’s Streaming Platform, you can conduct AI-Transcription and automatically convert speech to text for any Zype-hosted VOD - both new content you’re importing into the platform and existing video in your content library. Once transcriptions are completed, subtitles are automatically generated from these transcripts in SRT & WebVTT sidecar files. These new AI-enabled tools help content operations teams and editors create additional metadata from transcribed content, and the subtitles will help companies adhere to compliance laws and expand the reach of their video content to global audiences.
These tools are the first of several releases on our 2025 AI roadmap— with more to come later this year.
AI-Powered Transcription and Subtitle Generation offer many benefits to the Zype user, including:
- Transcribe select assets: Turn on transcription for a single clip or process your entire library
- New or existing assets: Transcribe videos or audio files upon import or bulk-transcribe existing files in your library
- Auto language detection: Transcribe content in different languages, as Zype can automatically detect different languages upon upload
- Real-time editing: Make a tweak in the in-platform editor and captions will update immediately
- Non-destructive workflow: AI tracks load in an “inactive” state so they never overwrite legacy subtitles
- Start for free: 300 free minutes every month, then pay as you grow with usage-based pricing.
Watch VP of Product, Steven Tripsas, demo AI-Powered Transcriptions & Translations
How It Works
For New Uploads
1. In Import & Upload, check “Transcribe Video” then select your video content to upload (The same option is available via API.) After the video is done transcoding, Zype’s speech-to-text engine analyzes audio, detects language, and automatically produces a transcript.
3. Head to the Subtitles tab where you’ll find that Zype has automatically generated SRT and WebVTT files. You can choose to activate the auto-generated subtitles by toggling on the “Active” button, or use alternative subtitles.
For Videos Already in Your Library
- Head to your Video Library, multi-select any assets you wish to transcribe, and hit Transcribe.
- Zype pulls audio from stored renditions (no mezzanine re-upload required).
- Transcripts and sidecar subtitle files appear in minutes in the Transcription and Subtitles tabs respectively. From there, you can edit text, download files, or batch-activate captions—all without leaving the dashboard!
If you prefer a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach, you also have the ability to enable Auto-Transcription and Subtitle Generation in your Settings menu under the new category “AI Enablement Settings”, and Zype will handle every future upload automatically.
Every Zype customer can transcribe up to 300 minutes of video per month at no charge. If you need more? Simply keep going—overage is billed by the minute, and subtitle generation remains free.
For detailed scenarios (e.g., automated transcriptions triggered by API calls), check out the Help Center article “When Are Videos Transcribed in Zype?” or browse the new AI Enablement category.
More AI-Powered Features still to come!
AI-powered Transcriptions and Subtitle generation are the first features we’re rolling out as part of Zype’s AI-roadmap, but there are more AI-enabled enhancements to come in the coming year, including things like deep content search for full video content searchability, intelligent metadata suggestions, subtitle language translation and more. Your feedback today directly shapes these upcoming features, so let us know what would level-up your workflow.
Ready to Try It?
Whether you’re chasing compliance, global growth, or simply a better viewer experience, Zype’s AI-powered tools make providing transcriptions and subtitles effortless. Reach out to us to get started with Zype today, and claim your 300 free minutes of AI-powered transcription, experiment with a few back-catalog gems, and watch accessibility, engagement, and discoverability rise together.
Zype’s mission has always been to simplify the complex world of video management. By embedding AI directly into the platform, we’re turning time-consuming tasks into one-click wins—so you can focus on creating, curating, and monetizing great content.