YouTube is attempting to provide a great service for the hearing impaired community. They are using speech recognition software to make transcribed captions available on most of their videos. There's just one problem, the results are... well... not particularly accurate, sometimes with hilarious results.
Take this "Believe In Our Future" ad from Mitt Romney:
This is what the captions say:
college grants was to get a chance to start by our business idol is like to
hire people of the wonder what you're going to be able to obey gets beat down
the road freedom and free enterprise are what create jobs not government
from those experiences i i one of the at the jet surrender but that's the salt
lake city in two thosuand two
i came in and found that we had at least andover deal with
but also financial crisis to deal with but advocates rover we had about a
hundred billion dollars that we put into and out of there for the future of the
pics four
the religious restlessness massachusetts i thought the budget
was badly out of balance
recover spending at what the situation e five percent democrat ove and every one
of the four years i was governor we balance the budget by what users
experiences to help americans have a better future
we believe in our future
we believe ourselves we believe the greatest days of america had
believe we can handle it
mitt romney approve this message
(more after the fold)
But it's not just Mitt Romney, check out this ad from President Obama:
The captions want us to believe he says this:
unbridled baba and i prove this message
i think the family's really out of touch with every two minutes
health issues this is not the nineteen fifties contraception is so important to
women it's about a woman being an intimate descisions i don't remember
anyone
as extreme as romney
cut off funding to plant edit indignant money came in and he's still in the
nineties and has to go to planned parenthood
planned parenthood
really get rid of that browning would definitely travis back
The good news is, YouTube makes it very easy to correct the bad captions.
1. Go into your video manager and click the down arrow next to the edit button. You will see an option for "Captions," click that.
2. Click on the box that says "Machine Transcript"
3. It will open up to show each caption in an editable format. Just click inside the line to correct the caption, then click "OK" and move on to the next one. When done, click "Done."
When you are done, a new active caption will show up at the top of the list. If you need to edit further, just click on the new active caption to continue editing. Don't click on the "Machine transcript" one again, because that will just take you into the original unedited version.
This is very easy to do and only takes a few minutes, assuming you know what is actually being said on the video.
So, there really is no excuse for these bad captions. Hopefully Obama for America will get them corrected soon.