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

[jackandahat]

Ah, I get you. Sorry, I'm a bit defensive because it seems like every time this is brought up, someone goes "But you can't expect it to work!" which... isn't the point. We know it doesn't work, our problem is other people who insist it does!

What would be great is if you could user-correct. Sadly, this will never happen because half the internet is made up of the kind of knuckledraggers who would use this as a chance to put swear words on kiddie programs and such.

[maewyn]

I am a little horrified that anyone could think you'd get accurate captioning just from software! Have these people spent any time at all with voice recognition software and how you have to speak just right, and train the software to your voice, and how the speaker(s) in your average YouTube video are doing neither of these things?

It could be awesome if users could report captioning errors, or even just flag a video in general for review of the captions, and then have someone go in to fix the errors. (I can dream, right?)

[jackandahat]

No, they haven't. And it follows a long tradition of sweeping aside disabled people by going "Well, we did something for you, what do you mean it's not enough/not what you asked for/doesn't work???"

It would be great - though as things stand every video would be flagged, so it doesn't really work.

[kyrielle]

What would be great would be if someone watching a video and spotting captioning issues could provide an alternate transcript that would be stored for review by someone (so people couldn't, as mentioned above, put swear words on kiddie programs), and released once reviewed.

[codeman38]

The obvious solution to that would be moderation, so that the video producer could outsource them but would have to give the final OK for them to show up.

But of course, Google wouldn't bother to implement something like that, now, would they?

[treeowl]

They would need a lot more infrastructure than you're suggesting. How would the moderators be chosen? There would need to be an awful lot of moderators. How would they prevent the knuckle-draggers from overwhelming the moderators with a flood of crud?

[codeman38]

Ah, good point. I was thinking it could be handled just like comments, with the video editor doing all the moderation... but then I consider just how frustrating it is to have to delete horrible comments. -_-;;

[treeowl]

It wouldn't be bad to offer that as an option to the video uploader, I suppose, but I'm not suer it's the best way to handle it.