YouTube, bless them.

[jackandahat]

They're trying. They're really trying. But after yet another person went on about how autocaptioning was "close enough", I grabbed the last video I'd had open and took a look at just how close the autocaptioning was to what I could hear. (Disclaimer - I am hard of hearing, but I lipread pretty well, so I think I know what they were saying.)

15 errors in 25 seconds of video.

Several of these totally changed the plot, some were just damn silly.

Expanded on here, now with bonus Cosby Show!

Comments

[codeman38]

Yeah, same here! Pretty much every video I see people link that only has auto-captions is practically incomprehensible, so much so that my dodgy auditory processing can make more sense of it.

Personally, I'm amazed more people haven't taken advantage of the auto-timing feature, where YouTube automatically adds timestamps to a straight transcript. That works surprisingly well, in fact-- because hearing already transcribed words is a much less intractable problem than making sense of audio with no hints at all.

[sophie]

I know I've definitely used it on one of my videos so far, and yes, it is pretty good :)