Two kinds of people, two uses
Learners use lesson transcripts to work through a course at their own speed: read a lesson before watching it, go back to one explanation without hunting through the timeline, and keep the whole course as text after the videos are gone from their watch history.
Instructors who publish courses on their own channel use transcripts to build the material around the videos. A corrected transcript becomes the lesson page on a course website, the handout, the captions on each video and the starting point for a written edition of the course.
Working through a series
A course is many videos, and import takes one video link at a time; playlist links are refused. Paste the first lesson, then add the next links to the queue and let them run together. Each lesson becomes its own transcript, named after the video's title, so the order of the course is easy to follow.
Keep terms consistent across lessons. A course on accounting or on a programming framework repeats the same vocabulary in every video, and the recognition engine may spell an unusual product name or acronym differently from one lesson to the next. Correct it as you read each transcript; the editor saves every change automatically.
How lesson audio affects the result
Course videos vary a lot in how they are recorded:
- Talking-head lessons with a clip-on or USB microphone give a strong draft in major languages.
- Screen recordings with a laptop microphone pick up keyboard noise and fan hum; the audio repair switch helps with steady background noise.
- Lessons with background music under the voice need more corrections.
- Interview-style lessons with a guest benefit from speaker identification, which is on paid plans or with a Minute Pack.
Exports for a course
Instructors usually want SRT or VTT to upload corrected captions for each lesson in YouTube Studio, and DOCX to turn the lesson into a written chapter. CSV gives one row per segment with its start time, which is handy for building a table of topics with links to the exact minute in each lesson. Learners often prefer TXT or PDF for notes.
If the course is yours, you can also upload the original lesson files instead of importing from YouTube; the result is the same. Only transcribe videos you have the right to use. A transcript of someone else's video is fine for your own notes and research; republishing it may need the owner's permission.