Summary
- YouTube tests upcoming changes with Premium subscribers before global release for everyone’s convenience.
- Viewers can now suggest caption corrections on desktop.
- Correct captions are important for better accessibility, and YouTube’s experiment aims to crowdsource correction efforts.
YouTube is one of our favorite entertainment apps on TV and on mobile, and it’s unsurprising that changes need to be tested thoroughly before they are released for the convenience of users worldwide. Before a public release, YouTube runs experiments to test upcoming changes with a small group of Premium subscribers. The newest such experiment focuses on correcting incorrect captions under videos with input coming straight from viewers, à la Google Maps.
YouTube transcripts and auto-translated captions are coming to your phone
You now have even more ways to watch videos on the platform
YouTube is a community-curated video platform, and is currently reliant on creator-supplied captions, or machine-generated captions. For videos that aren’t in a language you understand, the platform also has machine-generated caption translation support. However, the speech-to-text system Google uses in the background may falter due to the video presenter’s heavy accent and other variations in speech, creating incorrect captions and potentially misleading users.
Accurate captions, but not for everyone
In a recent update to the YouTube Help page dedicated to the latest test features and experiments, the developers explained viewers can watch videos on desktop with auto-generated captions switched on as a part of this experiment. If they encounter a mistake, they can suggest a correction by clicking the gear icon in the player → Subtitles → Suggest caption corrections. It should bring up a transcript of the video’s captions, where you can click the pencil icon, suggest the change, and hit the checkmark icon to submit.
While submitting corrections, you can also see submissions from other testers. To avoid duplicate suggestions, Google suggests upvoting the suggestion using the thumbs up icon. However, it’s important to note that suggested corrections won’t be visible to you, other testers, and users outside the experimental program immediately. YouTube forwards the suggestions to the subtitle panel visible to the video uploaders, and the onus of accepting suggestions lies on them.
For now, this YouTube experiment focuses on a small percentage of English-language channels where videos have auto-generated captions. If you’re interested in testing how this works, you need to use YouTube on a desktop through a web browser.
Better captions help people with hearing impairment and other accessibility concerns enjoy YouTube and other visual media comfortably, and considering the scale of YouTube’s operations, it only makes sense to crowdsource correction efforts. If this seems like an interesting experiment, be sure to visit youtube.com/new for other stuff you could try before public release.
