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What are you on about? Youtube's auto generated subtitles are pretty good. granted, 5-10% of them are miss, but they usually convey at least enough to grasp th

What are you on about? Youtube's auto generated subtitles are pretty good. granted, 5-10% of them are miss, but they usually convey at least enough to grasp the context. I would be lost without them (I'd have to be listening to really loud sound and/or focus more intensively to what is said)

throwaway290 3y ago
Your estimate is way too optimistic. But also what it doesn't get is usually key subject content and what it does get is low hanging fruit guessable from context. Sometimes I try subtitles on something I cannot understand (because English is my second language) and that has not helped ever, it's always gibberish. I tried going subtitles only a few times and gave up because I have to rewind and turn on sound every few seconds.
- danielbln 3y ago
  For me YouTube captions/transcription have always been really bad, but whenever YouTube switched to some Whisper equivalent (or Whisper itself, ha) it has improved tremendously and rarely gets things wrong, in my own experience.
Agentlien 3y ago
This has really not been my experience... until just now. A few times before I've tried using auto generated subs and every time I turned them off within a minute because so much of it is nonsense. Last time was about a month ago. It seemed to get a lot of simple sentences right but every few it completely misparsed. Additionally, it seemed like every uncommon name or technical term became something else. In light of your comment I went to YouTube to evaluate it again and... it's a lot better than I remember! I watched a few minutes of a video analysing some music and everything, including music terms, was correct.
- jdietrich 3y ago
  Seconded. The auto generated subtitles were basically useless until literally a matter of weeks ago, but there has clearly been some kind of massive advance. The auto-generated subtitles still struggle with very strong regional accents, very poor sound quality or people talking over each other, but they're good enough for the vast majority of content. It doesn't seem to make dumb errors any more, just the kind of understandable errors you'd expect from a human stenographer.
looperhacks 3y ago
Maybe for american English, but put an accent in there, or even just British English and it goes down, fast. I'm currently watching Taskmaster on YouTube and every time it's not crystal clear audio with no background noice, it's closer to 50% miss
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  For English I only notice it miss technical words, confusing them for more common words. Regardless of accent. For Russian, which I don't understand, the result is maybe 50% intelligible (particularly when technical jargon is probably involved). But 50% is still infinitely better than what I can do with Russian myself (0%).
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Idk, my English is not great but apparently I am better than YouTube subs because when I need help understanding an English word it turns out YT can't transcribe it either :/
  - ethanwillis 3y ago
    50% intelligible is not infinitely better than 0% intelligible. In fact it could be that you're completely misled into believing something that's not true at all. Whereas if you are aware you understand 0% you're not jumping to these wild conclusions as confidently.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      For context, I'm watching videos of a guy making jet engines in his garage. The consequence of being mislead is about zero. I'm not concerned about the 50% I miss. There are no wild conclusions being jumped to. If anybody jumps to any sort of wild conclusions on the basis of a 50% intelligible video, that's squarely on them.
      - throwaway290 3y ago

throwaway290 3y ago

Your estimate is way too optimistic. But also what it doesn't get is usually key subject content and what it does get is low hanging fruit guessable from context. Sometimes I try subtitles on something I cannot understand (because English is my second language) and that has not helped ever, it's always gibberish. I tried going subtitles only a few times and gave up because I have to rewind and turn on sound every few seconds.

danielbln 3y ago
For me YouTube captions/transcription have always been really bad, but whenever YouTube switched to some Whisper equivalent (or Whisper itself, ha) it has improved tremendously and rarely gets things wrong, in my own experience.

Agentlien 3y ago

This has really not been my experience... until just now. A few times before I've tried using auto generated subs and every time I turned them off within a minute because so much of it is nonsense. Last time was about a month ago. It seemed to get a lot of simple sentences right but every few it completely misparsed. Additionally, it seemed like every uncommon name or technical term became something else. In light of your comment I went to YouTube to evaluate it again and... it's a lot better than I remember! I watched a few minutes of a video analysing some music and everything, including music terms, was correct.

jdietrich 3y ago
Seconded. The auto generated subtitles were basically useless until literally a matter of weeks ago, but there has clearly been some kind of massive advance. The auto-generated subtitles still struggle with very strong regional accents, very poor sound quality or people talking over each other, but they're good enough for the vast majority of content. It doesn't seem to make dumb errors any more, just the kind of understandable errors you'd expect from a human stenographer.

looperhacks 3y ago

Maybe for american English, but put an accent in there, or even just British English and it goes down, fast. I'm currently watching Taskmaster on YouTube and every time it's not crystal clear audio with no background noice, it's closer to 50% miss

mcpackieh 3y ago
For English I only notice it miss technical words, confusing them for more common words. Regardless of accent. For Russian, which I don't understand, the result is maybe 50% intelligible (particularly when technical jargon is probably involved). But 50% is still infinitely better than what I can do with Russian myself (0%).
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Idk, my English is not great but apparently I am better than YouTube subs because when I need help understanding an English word it turns out YT can't transcribe it either :/
- ethanwillis 3y ago
  50% intelligible is not infinitely better than 0% intelligible. In fact it could be that you're completely misled into believing something that's not true at all. Whereas if you are aware you understand 0% you're not jumping to these wild conclusions as confidently.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    For context, I'm watching videos of a guy making jet engines in his garage. The consequence of being mislead is about zero. I'm not concerned about the 50% I miss. There are no wild conclusions being jumped to. If anybody jumps to any sort of wild conclusions on the basis of a 50% intelligible video, that's squarely on them.
    - throwaway290 3y ago