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Warning

Microsoft Stream (Classic) will be retired February 15, 2024 and replaced by Stream (on SharePoint). It is recommended to start using Stream (on SharePoint) by uploading videos to SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, or OneDrive.

Stream (Classic) live events will be retired September 15, 2023 and replaced by Teams live events.

Functionality in Stream (Classic) will be changed and removed leading up to the retirement date. Learn more...


Generate automatic captions and a transcript for your Microsoft Stream (Classic) videos

If a video's Language field is set to a supported language, Stream (Classic) can automatically generate captions using Automatic Speech Recognition technology.

Important

  • English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish languages are currently supported for autogenerated captions. NOTE: For USGOV we only support English and Spanish.

  • Only MP4 and WMV files are currently supported for automatic transcripts.

  • You have a choice: either autogenerate captions or upload a caption file:

    • You can't autogenerate captions if you have already uploaded a caption file.

    • You can't upload a caption file if you have selected the Autogenerate a caption file option.

Automatic captions take time to create. It typically takes 1-2x the video's duration, so for example, for a one hour video, expect to wait approximately two hours to finish processing.

Captions are used in three ways:

  • When watching a video, you can select to see captions at the bottom of the video.

  • Captions are concatenated to form a transcript, which is available in the transcript window.

  • Captions are indexed, so you can go directly to a specific location in a video by searching using deep search.

Enable autogenerated captions for your video

  1. Upload a video for which you want to enable autogenerated captions. If the video is already uploaded, go to the Edit video page.

  2. In the Details section, select a supported language.

    Language.

  3. On the Options tab, set Autogenerate captions to On.

    This setting won't be available if you have selected a non-supported language.

    Language.

  4. Stream (Classic) will automatically begin generating captions.

Upload a custom caption file

To upload a caption file, follow the steps in Add subtitles and captions.

Note

You can't upload a caption file if you have set Autogenerate captions to On. To upload a caption file, set this to Off.

Edit captions

You can edit autogenerated and uploaded captions using the transcript window, or by downloading the files from the Edit video page as described in Add subtitles and captions.