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That’s funny; I watch a lot of YouTube — mostly in English, mind you, but sometimes in other languages with English auto-translated captions — and I find the qu
by derefr 4y ago
That’s funny; I watch a lot of YouTube — mostly in English, mind you, but sometimes in other languages with English auto-translated captions — and I find the quality of YouTube’s auto-captions better than most “professionally”-produced captions, to the point that I would sometimes switch explicit captions off and revert back to auto-captions if I could.
I think this says more about the generally-low quality of the captioning services used by YouTube content creators than anything, though.
My biggest complaint is that I often find that human captioners don’t recognize domain-specific words. Like, names of ethnic foods. The word might be literally showing on the screen while the presenter is talking — and the “professional” captioer will just put [indistinct] there, as if they aren’t even watching the video as they’re captioning it. YouTube’s auto-captions get these words right every time.
My impression is that USM is seemingly uniquely good at code-switching from word to word within a sentence — which makes sense, given its “universality.” I think, if they allowed it, it would even be able to embed clauses and quotations generated in one language and alphabet, into a sentence generated in an entirely different language and alphabet, keeping syntax and grammatical structure correct for the given language within its clause.
- derbOac 4y agoI actually feel like the autocaptioning is one of those "I'm living in the future" moments. It's amazing to play a video in Swedish, and just have it autotranslate. I love it. It's not as good in my opinion as good human translation, but I agree that I've seen many translations that were much much much worse than the autocaptioning. I have had some channels where I was laughing out loud at the autocaptioning, which was probably more so translation, but I did get a laugh out of it after all, and I generally knew what they were saying. I've also noticed that, at least with the videos I watch, usually the autocaptioning errors seem "phonemically correct", so it's substituting a word that sounds the same, and I can easily figure out what was meant. Usually I've noticed these problems with more so with non-American English (British or Australian for example), especially where there are multiple people all speaking English, but with different accents. It does seem to me the English speech recognition is honed in on some west coast or midwest US English accent. I am surprised contextual cues aren't being utilized more but I'm very happy with the YouTube speech recognition.