The new AI whisper transcription is great for audio without text, but I assumed that when a YouTube video already has captions, it would continue to just import the already existing captions.
Therefore, I was a bit confused, when I imported an English video, that it already subtitled on YouTube and the lesson went on pending and was transcribed by the whisper AI.
Could we please get back the possibility to import already existing subtitles?
This should also be possible independent of the length of the video without a cut-off of 90 min.
If I can import a 1000-page novel, why not the subtitles of a longer YouTube video, provided that the subs already exist.
Might be helpful to post a link to the video you were trying so they can see why it may not have worked as you expected…otherwise they may not be able to address the issue you are having.
One thing to keep in mind is that if the subtitles were autogenerated subtitles on the video then Lingq probably ignores those. You may also have to make sure you have the non autogenerated subtitles selected and running when importing.
Why wouldn’t Lingq just grab the subtitles that are already auto generated by YouTube as it was the case before the implementation of the whisper AI?
It seems pointless to run the AI again when the subtitles already exist and have the lesson on pending again for an hour to generate new and potentially less accurate subtitles.
I am ecstatic to have the AI for my language, where Youtube doesnt provide subtitles but I dont see any use for it, when subtitles are already in the video.
I think the thought was that Whisper AI creates the better transcript.
For one thing, the autogenerated subtitles on youtube don’t have punctuation. When you import that into LingQ, then it’s difficult to sometimes tell where once sentence starts and ends. So even if the subtitles are accurate, they are less than ideal.
Are you finding the youtube autogenerated subtitles to be better in your case? Or just that it takes longer for the lesson to generate?
You can always do the import and then grab the transcript from youtube and overwrite the whisper ai generated lesson (although obviously a lot more work).
In Czech the AI is still quite error-prone. But there are no YouTube subtitles for that language so I am just happy for everything I can get.
I wanted to show the import function to a friend who wants to learn English. So I have not yet had the opportunity to compare the quality of the YouTube subtitles with the whisper transcriptions here. I was just confused that the AI would run again, when the subtitles already existed. Especially since transcriptions still take quite long or get stuck completely, are limited to 90 min and the lessons that have been AI generated always have quite some lag when looking up translations, saving words, turning pages, pausing and stopping audio.
I have found that in AI generated lessons, every click takes 4-6 seconds, which is not the case for non AI generated lessons.
For these reasons, I would find it preferable to be able to import, what is already there.
But you are right. There is no punctuation with the YouTube captions, which is something I wasn’t thinking of.