I use youtube closed captions all the time when I don't want to have audio. The captions are almost always fine. I definitely am not watching videos that would have had professional/human edited captions either.

There may be mistakes like the ones you mentioned (getting names wrong/inconsistent), but if I know what was intended, it's pretty easy to ignore that. I think expecting "textual" correctness is unreasonable. Usually when there are mistakes, they are "phonetic", i.e. if you spoke the caption out loud, it would sound pretty similar to what was spoken in the video.

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dqv 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

> I think expecting "textual" correctness is unreasonable.

Of course you think that, you don't have to rely solely on closed captions! It's usually not even posed as an expectation, but as a request to correct captions that don't make sense. Especially now that we have auto-captioning and tools that auto-correct the captions, running through and tweaking them to near-perfect accuracy is not an undue burden.

> if you spoke the caption out loud, it would sound pretty similar to what was spoken in the video.

Yes, but most deaf people can't do that. Even if they can, they shouldn't have to.

	▲	beeboobaa6 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		There's helping people and there's infantilizing them. Being deaf doesn't mean you're stupid. They can figure it out. Deleting thousands of hours of course material because you're worried they're not able to understand autogenerated captions just ensures everyone loses. Don't be so ridiculous.

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mst 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

They continue to be the worst automated transcripts I encounter and personally I find them sufficiently terribad that every time I try them I end up filing them under "nope, still more trouble than it's worth, gonna find a different source for this information and give them another go in six months."

Even mentally sounding them out (which is fine for me since I have no relevant disabilities, I just despise trying to take in any meaningful quantity of information from a video) when they look weird doesn't make them tolerable *for me*.

It's still a good thing overall that they're tolerable for you, though, and I hope other people are on average finding the experience closer to how you find it than how I find it ... but I definitely don't, yet.

Hopefully in a year or so I'll be in the same camp as you are, though, overall progress in the relevant class of tech seems to've hit a pretty decent velocity these days.