Captions and transcripts, written for me
Captions used to be the chore that never got done — transcribing an hour of teaching by hand, or paying someone to. On a bernard course they simply happen: upload a video (Put my own video file into a lesson) and a few minutes later the words are there.
What your learners get
- Captions, one tap away. A button on the player switches them on and off — for the learner watching on a train, the one whose first language isn't yours, the one who just absorbs more by reading along.
- A transcript that follows along. Beside the video, the current line highlights as you speak. Click any line and the video jumps there — re-watching one tricky step no longer means scrubbing back and forth.
- Search inside the lesson. A find box over the transcript takes a learner straight to the moment you said the thing they're looking for (Where do I say that? Search inside my own lessons).
- Chapters, written for you. A handful of chapter markers appear on the player automatically, so a learner can jump straight to the section they want instead of scrubbing through the whole lesson — you can edit the titles if one reads oddly.
One honest note: automatic captions occasionally mishear unusual words — names, jargon, the vocabulary of your craft. The fix is cheap: ask Bernard to read a lesson's transcript and point out anything that looks off. The prompt below does exactly that.
Transcripts also make your teaching legible beyond the player. Like the notes under each video (Add a lesson to my course), words are what search engines and AI assistants can actually read — a course full of spoken teaching is invisible to them; a course with transcripts is not.
The prompt
“Read the transcript of the [lesson name] lesson in my [course name] course and tell me if any names or technical terms look misheard.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- Do I have to write captions for my course videos?
- No. A few minutes after you upload a video, captions have been written for it automatically. Learners choose whether to show them with one tap on the player — some always watch with them on, some never do, and both get their way.
- How accurate are automatic captions?
- Very good on ordinary speech, occasionally wrong on unusual words — a glaze name, a person's name, a term of your trade. It's worth asking Bernard to read a lesson's transcript and flag anything that looks misheard, especially for the lessons people see first.
- Do learners see the transcript too?
- Yes — next to the video, a transcript follows along as you speak, and clicking any line jumps the video to that moment. Captions and transcript arrive on their own after upload; the lesson page around them still changes only when you approve it.