YouTube Audio Transcription broken, hates Australians

Posted Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 11:04 am by Jason Cartwright |

Announced on the 5th of March, YouTube had added audio transcription to videos in an effort to increase accessibility. Just hover over the CC button in the player, then select the ‘Transcribe Audio’ option. Available in 50 different languages, it’s an ambitious venture from Google. One that could potentially open up videos to truly world-wide viewing.

The Transcribe audio feature is currently in beta and they’ve certainly got some work to do. I tested it on one of my videos (obviously have an Australian accent), it got this sentence completely wrong.

In the example below, I actually say the words:
“Hi this is Jason from Wodonga Australia and I think the story of the decade has..”

YouTube Translate interprets what I said as:
”but is this just in from would over a stray a and I think the story of the day Kennedy has”.

Clearly it’s not even close, naturally I wasn’t expecting 100% accuracy here, but this translation is so far off, it’s completely unusable. Have you experienced the same results ? 

More @ YouTube and the YouTube Blog