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YouTube Has 1 Billion Videos With Closed-Captioning (But Not All of Them Are Accurate) (variety.com)
Over a billion videos on YouTube are accessible to viewers with difficulties in hearing, thanks to the video giant's automated captions, it said Thursday. From a report on Variety: That certainly sounds impressive -- except when you realize that many of the site's automatically generated captions aren't completely right. The Google-owned video giant first launched captions back in 2006, and three years later introduced automatic speech recognition to add closed-captioning to YouTube content. Today, YouTube users watch video with auto-generated captions more than 15 million times per day. But the system is prone to errors. For example, the trailer for Amazon Studio's Oscar-nominated "Manchester by the Sea" (at this link) includes numerous inaccuracies in the auto-transcribed captions, sometimes to hilarious -- not to mention frustrating -- effect.
> thanks to the video giant's automated captions, > That certainly sounds impressive -- except when you realize that many of the site's automatically generated captions aren't completely right.
I know robots are taking over jobs. But put those two statements together and this sounds like auto-generated bad lip reading.
Now if someone could only implement all possible bad lip readings, and then auto-rate them for hilarity, we would be onto something.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
...if they're not doing it behind the scenes already. You should try putting your own face through the test tool AWS has, it's outright scary.
I wonder if google could marry this with their tensorflow framework, and maybe figure out why Casey Affleck always looks like he's having trouble holding in a fart.
Thank you for submitting your video RickDeath, we will get right on close captioning it.
Something is clearly wrong with the translations of the Downfall videos. Sometimes it's about SAP, sometimes it's about the World Cup, but my limited German tells me it's about the fall of the Third Reich.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
How about "Not Any of Them Are Accurate" ?
Seriously, has anyone seen one that actually is correct?
...in which Hitler finds out Youtube has 1 billion videos with subtitles, but not all of them are accurate.
site's automatically generated captions aren't completely right
Maybe they are generating the comments as well
But I did read, that it *IS* very much worth your while to put accurate CC on your videos, as that it supposedly highly figures into your Google rankings.
I found that after I transcribed my videos, my rankings did shoot up higher on plain old Google searches and I think also on YouTube suggestions, etc.....so, looks to be worthwhile to do if you want max hits.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I write closed-captioning on my videos ( https://www.youtube.com/ruddk/ ) in two languages(those with speech) and about 25% of them are viewed with CC on. :) But I was surprised to see that many people using closed-captioning.
Now that might be because of my mumbling and my less than ideal English skills.
But is just a hobby for me because I like tinkering with it.
Why bad lip reading? Why not your basic garden variety bad speech recognition?
And I don't need to pay extra money for that.
Task one undergarment.
#DeleteFacebook
I recently watched a video with closed captioning on.
'stan fortuna school of the eucharist'
lets just say google search doesn't think eucharist is a common term and has an especially hard time with it when it is a quickly spoken rap song with a Hispanic accent.
It was pretty funny what they translated it too.
It did leave me wondering if there should be a mechanism to tell them the words are wrong and really wrong.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I grew up in Boston, and when I go back to the old neighborhood it makes me wonder how people understand me at all. Speech recognition programs never work for me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Or Stuff That Matters?
I still don't see it.
Why bad lip reading? Why not your basic garden variety bad speech recognition?
https://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading
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I've lost the link, but someone recently mentioned an intentionally humorous duo who:
1) write a skit, perform it, and upload to Google
2) let captioning take its best stab
3) use the captioning as a new script, and re-record the scene
4) upload and re-caption
5) record a third time, with even weirder dialogue
Then they splice it all together, and you get to watch the degeneration of language as iterative captioning makes everything nonsensical.
My wife and I also tend to watch a lot of TV when the other wants quiet, so closed captioning is almost always on for all shows. The quality and consistency can vary wildly, and sometimes the mistakes are hilariously bad. (One particularly bad one I recall is "Atlas Shrugged" coming out as "At Last Shrub" and some other cases where a British show has about half of the dialogue listed as [indecipherable] even if it seemed clear enough to us). Occasionally, though, we'll get captioning that either relays something we thought was indecipherable, or even calls out something ("distant cry for help" or "creepy creak") that we couldn't hear/notice on our own.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
From my personal experience, I can't help but wonder if there is even ONE out of all the auto-generated captions that is accurate at all. :P
Have you guys ever seen one? I mean, a few mistakes are ok... but so far I haven't seen any video that had auto-generated captions that was even understandable at all. More like a mish mash of guesses.
Which is great for comedic effect I guess, but not so much for viewers with difficulties in hearing.
Accuracy is not that important to me. We all are pretty used to inaccuracies while texting now. What is important to me is the synchronization. If the captions follow the actual speech by more than just a bit, it makes it hard for me to follow as I lip read in addition to reading the captions. Lip reading is often ok by itself, but with movies and TV, the speakers face is not always pointed to the camera or there might be something covering the speakers lips. That's when cc comes in handy.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Yeah, the Swedish Chef video was quite wrong...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Perfection is the goal. But doing better than current version is the shipping criterion.
Auto captioning is better than no captioning for hearing impaired.
And human captioning is not perfect. I remember watching Lion King with closed captioning turned on and they had missed a crucial "o" in some dialog that had the word "count".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is a video of a promotional event for the new Ghost in the Shell movie including an interview with Takeshi Kitano. The interviewer is asking the questions in English and Kitano is answering in Japanese but the google captions are performing the speech recognition as if it was English. I found it pretty funny.
The interview starts at around 15 min.
Tokyo Event
on the plus side, Google can say whatever they want in videos and blame it on robots...
Google's automatic captioning sucks balls. It is horrid. I am embarrassed to have it on any video I've made. They need to shut the system down, fire all the staff working on it, and take the equivalent money and pay for reliable transcriptionists to closed-caption the videos the old fashioned way. :|>
Now, do you want to know what I really think?
Not always a bad thing.
Bad Lip Reading are far more entertaining than the actual text of the presidential debates, for example.
-Styopa
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Look it up.
I watched last Sunday's Last Week Tonight. The captions were mostly okay but the goofs were funny in their own right.
Anyone who's actually watched YouTube with captions will know almost immediately what I'm getting at in the subject. Saying the system "is prone to errors" as above is being very kind. Amongst its many errors are frequent phantom occurrences of the word "yeah". While the phantom "yeah" instances are more funny than anything else, many of the other errors are much worse. Amongst other problems they have been known to convert a family-friendly video into something that no longer fits that description.
Are any of them accurate? Can you manually enter captions?
Undertake this discourse, actually types.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The transcripts for the videos are average at best - but thats alphabet ( Alpha Beta) all over - all there code is either alpha or beta but never polished.
For some reason Youtube thinks that people speaking with a New Zealand accent swear a lot. I was testing the Youtube product tutorial on an Android product which, unlike PC browsers, has the closed captioning on by default. A lot of the technical terms, spoken with a Kiwi accent, were being captioned with obscene words. When I recovered from laughing at just how rude it was being I warned our marketing team that made the video. They were mortified and suddenly had a large task of checking and removing the computer generated captions. It turns out all of our SFW videos had NSFW captions.
Clearly, these algorithms don't know what a bubblah or a blinkah or a clickah is.
.... and every single times it was WRONG at least for 90% of the audio.
The only time CC has worked, is when the uploader included the subtitles with the video.
There is a mechanism to tell them the words are wrong. YouTube has a crowd sourced option for subtitles called "Community contributions" that you can turn on as a content owner. You can make it available for anyone to sub your videos http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel.