Train Your AI Chatbot on YouTube, Loom, and Help Videos

TL;DR: Most companies have a hidden knowledge base buried in their videos. Product walkthroughs on YouTube, Loom recordings of demos, webinar replays, onboarding tutorials. Boei now lets you upload SRT subtitle files directly to your AI chatbot so that knowledge becomes searchable. Export captions from YouTube or any tool that produces an SRT, drop the file into Boei training, and the chatbot can answer questions from your video content the same way it answers from PDFs and web pages.

If your company has more than ten videos online, there is a good chance most customer questions are already answered somewhere in them. The problem is that videos are opaque. A visitor cannot Ctrl+F a 14-minute walkthrough to find the one minute that explains pricing.

That is the gap SRT training fills. Instead of telling customers "watch this video and skip to 8:42", your AI chatbot reads the transcript, finds the relevant moment, and gives them the answer in text.

What Is an SRT File and Why Use It

SRT (SubRip Subtitle) is the most common subtitle format on the web. Every YouTube video has one. Every Loom recording can export one. Most webinar platforms produce them automatically.

An SRT file is just plain text with timestamps:

1
00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:04,500
Welcome to the product walkthrough. Today we'll cover pricing.

2
00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:08,300
Boei starts at $19 per month for the Starter plan.

This is perfect for AI training. The chatbot does not need to watch the video. It just needs the words. SRT gives you those words, with timestamps included, in a structured format the AI can index.

What Boei Does With Your SRT File

When you upload an SRT to your Boei chatbot, the platform:

1. Strips the timestamp blocks so the AI sees clean prose, not interleaved numbers
2. Splits the transcript into context-aware chunks so retrieval pulls the right segment, not the whole video
3. Indexes each chunk in the vector database alongside your other training material
4. Cites the source so when the AI answers from your video, the visitor can see which file (and which video) the answer came from

You can upload multiple SRT files at once, mix them with PDFs, web pages, and product CSVs, and the chatbot blends all of them when answering.

Where to Get SRT Files for Your Content

You probably have more SRT files available than you realize.

YouTube

Every public YouTube video that has captions (auto-generated or human-edited) lets you download the SRT. From any video page, click the three-dot menu under the video, choose Show transcript, and you can copy the lines or use a free tool like DownSub to grab the file directly.

For your own channel, log in to YouTube Studio, open the video, click Subtitles, and download the SRT for whichever language track you want.

Loom

Loom auto-generates transcripts on every paid plan. Open the video, click the three-dot menu, choose Edit transcript, and export as SRT.

Zoom and webinar platforms

Zoom Cloud Recording produces a VTT file for every recorded meeting (including webinars). VTT is the same format as SRT with a slightly different header. You can convert it for free at subtitletools.com or use a free Python script.

Vimeo, Wistia, and others

All major video platforms have caption export. The menu wording varies, but search for "captions", "subtitles", or "transcript export" in their help docs.

No captions yet?

Run your video through Whisper (free, runs locally) or any of the dozens of transcription SaaS products. Output it as SRT.

Step-By-Step: Train Boei on a YouTube Tutorial

Let us walk through a real example. Suppose you have a 12-minute YouTube video titled "How to set up your first chatbot in Boei" and you want the chatbot to be able to answer setup questions from it.

1. Get the SRT. Open the video on YouTube, click the three-dot menu, choose Show transcript, and use any SRT extractor to download it. Save it as boei-setup-tutorial.srt.
2. Open your chatbot in Boei. Go to Train > Files.
3. Upload the SRT. Drag the file into the upload area. Boei detects the format automatically.
4. Wait for indexing. A 12-minute video transcript indexes in under a minute.
5. Test it. Open the chatbot and ask "How do I set up my first chatbot?" The reply will come straight from the video, with the SRT file shown as the source.

That is it. No transcoding, no manual chunking, no copy-paste from the YouTube transcript pane.

Why This Matters for Customer Support

A few patterns make video-trained chatbots especially powerful:

• Onboarding walkthroughs. Most onboarding videos cover the same ten questions support gets every day. Indexing those transcripts deflects the questions before they hit your inbox.
• Webinar recordings. A one-hour webinar contains hundreds of micro-answers. Most of that knowledge dies after the live event. SRT training keeps it discoverable.
• Product release videos. When a new feature ships, the explainer video is often the most up-to-date description of how it works. Train the bot on the SRT and the bot is current the day the video goes live.
• Loom demo recordings for sales. If your team records personalized Looms for prospects, the Looms often cover edge cases your written docs do not. Bulk-uploading those SRTs gives the bot a much richer answer set.

Combining SRT with Your Other Training Sources

SRT training stacks with everything else Boei reads:

• Your website pages (auto-trained on signup)
• PDFs and Word docs (manuals, policies, contracts)
• Excel and CSV (product catalogs, pricing tables)
• PowerPoint (sales decks, internal training)
• Revised answers (exact Q&A pairs that override the AI when matched)

The chatbot picks the best source per question. A pricing question might pull from your pricing page. A "how do I configure X" question might pull from a Loom transcript. A spec question might pull from a PDF datasheet. The visitor sees the answer plus the source so they can verify or dig deeper.

What This Replaces

Before SRT training, teams had three bad options for video knowledge:

1. Manually rewrite videos as text articles. Slow, gets out of date, and most teams never finish.
2. Embed the YouTube link and hope the customer watches. Most do not.
3. Train the bot only on your written docs and accept that the video knowledge is invisible. Common, but it leaves a lot of value on the table.

SRT training removes the rewrite step. Your videos become first-class training material with no extra effort.

Privacy and Hosting

Boei processes your SRT files on EU infrastructure. Files are stored securely and never used to train any third-party AI model. If you delete the file from training, the chunks are removed from the vector index too. Full details on the privacy page.

Try It on Your Own Content

If you already have a YouTube channel, a Loom library, or a stack of webinar recordings, the fastest way to see whether your videos add value to your chatbot is to upload three or four SRTs and ask the bot questions from each video. You will know within minutes whether the answers are sharper.

Start a 7-day free trial and try training on your own SRT files. No credit card required.