Yes, I’m pretty sure the extension has always refused to import auto-generated subtitles at least whenever I (accidentally) tried over the years. I assume it must have started working only recently and apparently broke soon after.
Since other websites and programs can extract those subtitles, I don’t think there’s anything technically preventing LingQ from importing those. But I could be wrong of course.
As to the accuracy, I looked at some auto-generated German subtitles from https://www.youtube.com/@artede and it’s not too bad, definitely some “typos”, no punctuation, some wrongly transcribed names, but better than nothing I guess. Pretty sure Whisper would beat it easily, at least in its best languages like German and English.
I should clarify, I’m not opposed to this feature, I’m rather indifferent actually. But it seems people do want this feature, so LingQ should probably consider making this feature available again. (The language I’m most interested in, Mandarin Chinese, is apparently not considered significant enough by Google to be supported 
)
Can you explain the difference to me Bamboozled? These are my Youtube import settings
{ value: ‘yue-HK’, text: ‘Cantonese’ },
{ value: ‘zh-Hans’, text: ‘Chinese (Simplified)’ },
{ value: ‘zh-HanT’, text: ‘Chinese (Traditional)’ },
the first one is Cantonese, which is a Chinese language, HK stands for Hong Kong. And the other two are Mandarin Chinese, one subtitle “language” for the traditional character set (as used for example in Taiwan) and one for the simplified set as used in Mainland China.
What I was referring to were the auto-generated subtitles, which are not supported in these languages (to the best of my knowledge).
Thanks for the lesson in Chinese. The auto generated subtitles are supported for simplified, I just checked.
Cantonese autogen failed when translating from english
I am 99% sure that I have imported automatically generated subs in the past. If Lingq had an option to import videos from youtube and generate a transcript for them with wisper that would be even better of course.
But as right now you would always have to go to a third party solution to get an mp3 and then import it in lingq.
You are also right that the quality of the generated subs are not ideal. But videos with real subtitles are very rare.
What’s the status? I’ve been unable to do this for a while now.
YouTube importing should work properly again now. Are you guys still having issues?
Im still having the issue
Yes. Still having issues:
This problem was why I cancelled my subscription and I don’t plan on purchasing another until this gets fixed.
No it does not work with automatic generated subtitles. The real ones have always worked.
I am on chrome and am using the LingQ importer extension to import.
Version is 2.3.12
If I can provide more info feel free to ask.
This one doesn’t work for me, although before it would show the error almost immediately, but now the loading screen stays for a while before showing the error.
@Denys_B I usually don’t care because in these cases I manually copy/paste the video’s transcript on LingQ, but for the sake of testing I have just tried a random video and it doesn’t work.
video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt07uECR9jU
result:
Likewise. When sharing YouTube link (with auto- generated subtitles) to LingQ app, it freezes for a bit before displaying the error message.
Thanks for your answers, guys and sorry for the inconvenience.
Be sure the bug will be fixed very soon.
You may be interested to know that, most likely AI will be used by LingQ to transcribe non-original (auto-generated or absent) subtitles in the near future, so the quality of imported YT lessons should increase as well.
@Denys_B that’s great to know, we have talked in another conversation that AI translates better than the current auto-generated Youtube subtitles. This would be a massive speed-up in both convenience and quality improvement.
Still having issues, it is really a big problem since the most interesting videos only have automatic subtitles…
Zoran can we please put priority on this? Most youtube videos have auto-generated subtitles only. Can we get an update at least on why it’s taking so long? Maybe someone in the community can share information if you share the problems the team is facing.