YouTube now Adding Close Captioning Automatically

Sound promising. Though we have yet to see how it'll work in different variables, i.e. accents, background noises, music etc.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that sounds a lot better on paper than it does in practice.

I tried it on a video about adaptive sports on UCLA's channel, and the phrase "we're doing rock climbing as well as table tennis," pronounced in a perfectly neutral Hollywood-style accent, was transcribed as "for doing what I mean as well as Democrats." Also, "wheelchair basketball" became "mister bass one."

Perhaps as the technology gets better this will improve, but for right now, it's like trying to read subtitles on a bad bootleg DVD...

You are right, from what I hear it has about a 70% accuracy rate. But it is a good start if you ask me.

The variance in accuracy encountered when having voicemails automatically transcribed is huge, so assuming this uses the same acoustic model, we can't hope for better results. At least not right away.

Fortunately, if anybody can pull it off, it's Google. As I understand it, the speech corpus they've assembled is beyond massive. There is simply no way that even half of it has been incorporated into their acoustic model yet, so we should be able to count on steady improvement in recognition accuracy.