YouTube Auto-Captioning

A New Meme Is Brewing: YouTube CaptionFail. This is one of those situations, where you wonder, is it better to have captions even though a lot of it is messed up or no captions at all.

I tried to autocaption two of my previously captioned videos. I took off the captions and let YouTube try its hand. Well, so much for a fun opportunity to compare the original captioned video and YouTube’s. YouTube’s autocraptions failed in both cases. Maybe my accent was too much for it.

OK, I’ll take a little something over nothing. Heck, you can get a lot of laughs by searching for YouTube caption fail in Twitter. Latest from YouTube on captioning and YouTube’s autocaptioning instructions.

Just last night, I caught a funny caption mistake. The caption said, “A strange couple” in reference to Jin and Sun on Lost. I said to my husband, “Oh my gosh… that’s so politically incorrect.”

“It’s ‘estranged,'” corrected my husband. And that made sense.

Talk about a bad typo.

More caption fails:

What are some of your favorite caption fails?

4 comments

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    • Meryl on March 18, 2010 at 8:32 am

    And a great post on this topic: “Auto-garbled captioning.”

    Belorussian translation of this post. Cool, eh?

  1. My favorite auto-captioning blooper is this one, from an episode of “Sid the Science Kid”. I heard the alphabet song many times in school, but I don’t recall it ever quite going like this:
    http://twitpic.com/siem9

    • Meryl on March 18, 2010 at 2:35 pm

    Ha! Good find, Codeman! Thanks for sharing.

    • Meryl on March 26, 2010 at 9:34 am

    Another post on garbled fun. Auto-garbled Captioning

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