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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.

9 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. So we're talking Auto Generated Bad Lip Reading? by DickBreath · · Score: 2

    > 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.
  2. Re:So we're talking Auto Generated Bad Lip Reading by s1d3track3D · · Score: 2

    Thank you for submitting your video RickDeath, we will get right on close captioning it.

  3. Re:So we're talking Auto Generated Bad Lip Reading by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Yeah, the auto generated CC is pretty bad.

    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.

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    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  4. Re:Goes for comments too... by DickBreath · · Score: 2

    Maybe Slashdot is what was used for beta testing auto generated comments.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  5. about as good as google search. by fish_in_the_c · · Score: 2

    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.
  6. Re:Lip Reading? by swillden · · Score: 2

    Why bad lip reading? Why not your basic garden variety bad speech recognition?

    https://www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading

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  7. Make perfect the enemy of good. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2
    It is true in software engineering, and it is true everywhere.

    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".

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  8. Re:about 25% uses them by aevan · · Score: 2

    I use CC even in languages I understand. Sometimes it's the background noise or multiple people talking (in the movie, or kids running around irl), sometimes the speaker mumbles, sometimes I have the volume low/muted, and sometimes they just speak so damn slow and I'm feeling impatient. I also like when the CC is in another language so as to give to alternate impressions of the dialogue (though if the 'sub' is bad it drives me nuts 'that isn't what they said!' :P ).

    So by all means, continue doing CC. Some need it, and some just enjoy it.

  9. Youtube has a potty mouth by ukoda · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.