Google Introduces Video Transcripts For Easier Navigation In Google Drive: Here's How It Works

Google has introduced a new update for Google Drive named Video Transcript feature for users to easily navigate through videos efficiently.

Hyderabad: Google has rolled out a video transcript feature for Google Drive, allowing users to easily navigate through videos. The latest update enhances last year's automatically-generated captions feature. With this new addition, Google Drive users will now be able to view and search through transcripts within videos uploaded to Drive.

The main highlight of this new feature is that a user can go to a specific part of the video by tapping on a specific sentence in the transcript, which will jump the video to that specific time. Notably, the new video transcript feature is an upgrade to the automatically-generated captions feature introduced by Google last year.

Google Drive Video Transcript Feature: What's New?

In a Workspace blog post, Google explained that the new video transcript feature is built upon the existing automatically-generated captions feature for videos uploaded to Google Drive. The latter was launched in July 2024, allowing users to automatically generate captions for uploaded videos (even though Workspace admins can restrict this to manual requests).

Initially, when the automatically-generated captions feature was introduced, the Mountain View-based tech giant explained that speech recognition technology was used to produce captions, given that the spoken language in the video was English. Google indicated that the feature would expand support to other languages as well, but it is not yet available.

The current update allows a separate transcript panel to appear on the right side of the video when played in Google Drive. The video transcript feature includes timestamps, with each sentence appearing as a separate entry. A search bar is also available in the panel, making it easy for users to find specific words or phrases present in the video.

Once you click on any sentence in the transcript, it will make the video jump directly to that specific time frame. This helps save users time and effort in manually scrolling through the video timeline.

Google Drive Video Transcript Feature: How To Use

To use this feature, a user must first play the video in Google Drive and make sure that the captions or CC button present at the bottom right side of the Drive player is enabled. Check, whether it is active or greyed out. Then follow the below-mentioned steps:

Step 1: Click onSettings.

Step 2: Select the Transcript option.

This will open the transcript panel on the right side, which will allow users to navigate, search, and browse through the entire video easily.