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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.
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.........
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.