Are they crappy though? Most of the time it gets things right, even if they aren't as accurate as a human. And sure, they probably have better techniques for this, but are they cost-effective to run at YouTube-scale? I think their current solution is good enough for most purposes, even if it isn't perfect

I'm watching YouTube videos with subtitles for my wife, who doesn't speak English. For videos on basic topics where people speak clear, unaccented English, they work fine (i.e. you usually get what people are saying). If the topic is in any way unusual, the recording quality is poor, or people have accents, the results very quickly turn into a garbled mess that is incomprehensible at best, and misleading (i.e. the subtitles seem coherent, but are wrong) at worst.

Japanese auto captions suck