I have a friend who's hard of hearing who has recently come to lean on subtitles for movies and TV shows. In this particular case, for the improv comedy show, Whose Line Is It Anyway (WLIIA).
There are presently various options for AI driven subtitle generators / creators, and at first glance in 2025 I've found it challenging to strike a balance between accuracy and price. However, I've found a reasonable if a bit tedious way to get the best of both worlds, through plain old YouTube.
Unflattering as that may be (mainly because they've lately amped up trying to shove ads in my face, but I digress) YouTube has proven to be quite capable for this task. In my case, I happened to obtain a collection of WLIIA episodes online through a trustworthy source, but unfortunately only a fraction of them have accompanying English subtitles.
YouTube turned my frown upside down and made it surprisingly easy to generate subtitles not only to view on YouTube itself, but to download in case you plan to stream on your very own home network. Here are the steps, with screenshots as needed.
First, you need a YouTube channel.
Next, via PC browser, click the Create icon in the upper-right corner, then Upload videos. Add a video to subtitle and wait for it to complete.
From the list of videos for your channel, click the newly uploaded one to open Video details. Then, scroll down to Language and captions certification => Video language, and choose English (United States) from the dropdown.
IMPORTANT: As part of setting the video's details, be sure to set the Visibility to either Private or Unlisted. Why becomes clearer later. Proceed through the remaining steps as prompted to save the video changes.
From the details screen, click Subtitles in the left-hand column. After uploading the video, it takes a minute or few for YouTube to auto-generate subtitles leveraging its AI internals. That leads to at least one, possibly several entries listed under Video subtitles, and each of those upon hovering under the Subtitles column gives you the ability to edit, delete, or via an Options submenu, download a subtitle file.
Among the subtitle sets listed, click edit to verify the generated subtitles are human readable. At least one should be, and for that, download the file in .SRT format. Once the download is complete, delete so that NO subtitle entries are listed for the video.
Now the tricky, counterintuitive part. From the video's details screen, the right-hand column, click Subtitles, and upload the subtitles file from the previous step.
The video, uploaded to your very own YouTube channel and available online according to its visibility, now has machine generated English subtitles.