Hey everyone. I was wondering if anyone has good experiences using YouTube’s auto transcriptions when importing lessons into LingQ? I’m learning Arabic, and I find that it can get words wrong, and the sentence placement is always off. I know I can’t expect it to be perfect, but there’s so much good content out there that I want to use, that is inhibited by the inaccuracy of the captions. I wanted to know if anyone has a different method or if you also use this method and just brute force it? I’ve tried editing lessons several times but it takes so long and I end up spending more time editing than I do listening and reading.
Thank you!
Editing the lessons manually is definetely a lot of work for not much gain, so I wouldn’t recommend it. I can’t speak for Arabic, but in general the quality of automatically generated transcriptions differ strongly based on a variety of factors.
You can still use those transcriptions, even if they are a bit of, if you are able to understand it and you have the feeling it helps you memorize words and phrases. You shouldn’t solely use them, though, to make sure that you get the spelling of the words correct.
You could also try other means for creating transcription. You can download YouTube videos or the respective audio using tools as yt-dlp or YouTube Playlist Downloader. The first one has no graphical user interface, but features more options. You can then use a tool like FasterWhisperXXL to transcribe the audio. You will have to see whether the results gained by that is better than the YouTube automated subtitles.
yt-dlp can also be used to download the subtitles directly. You could then use ChatGPT to let it correct the subtitles. Maybe that improves the quality.
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Personally I just deal with the inaccuracies. I do not think it is worth your time as a language learner to spend much time editing captions or looking for endless tools to get it 5% more accurate. If the captions are so bad that they are unusable, I just drop the video and find another one as there is enough out there to entertain me endlessly.
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Thanks to you both! Very good insights. I’ll give the transcript programs a go to see if it helps, but I’m glad to hear some people just put up with it and make adjustments when needed.
I do not worry too much about it, ngl. Sometimes I take it as a challenge to realise if there is a mistake and to correct it by my own. I don’t think seeing smth wrong once will affect me too much. I stand with this:
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