Auto-generated Thai now widely available on YouTube

[Gaccha]

Since the beginning of this week (as far as I can tell) Thai language subtitles auto- generated by a computer are available for everything from Shorts to old uploads. The option has been available for certain select videos for around a year already, but the creator of the video had to opt in for the function to work.

 

 

Simply select from the settings menu:

 

 

Unlike auto-generated English it is not available for live broadcasts. 

 

Presumably this is using Google Live Transcribe software (because Google owns YouTube) and anyone who has used that knows that the speech recognition software is not especially great. But it's doing a pretty good job from what I've seen so far, even on old movies with very poor quality soundtracks.

 

 

 

[DTL2014]

Google lens is great for translating text from a photo of a document - now i can actually understand the ingredients on packets of food (Gluten intolerant)

[JackGats]

Auto-generated subtitles are not much use for learning a language because they contain many mistakes.

 

They have even become a nuisance as Youtube seems to have the feature on by default everytime you open Youtube.

 

 

[Gaccha]

2 hours ago, JackGats said:

Auto-generated subtitles are not much use for learning a language because they contain many mistakes.

 

Very strongly disagree. It is true there are errors, but overall it is an enormous net benefit. I would encourage all intermediate-advanced learners to use as a vital tool in rapid learning.

 

Obviously you can switch off the default very easily.

[JackGats]

Youtube has quite a few classic cult movies you can watch for free, like The Great Combo, Sunset Boulevard, The Red House etc. For some reason these free movies never have original sub-titles. Running auto-generated sub-titles (in the original English) shows what a dog's breakfast auto-generated sub-titles make of the actors' lines.

 

For intermediate-advanced learners, some teachers of Thai include their own 100% word-for-word sub-titles, like this teacher:

 

 

Note that VOA Thai include their own sub-titles if you want to practise on the news, provided you put up with the political bias! If you want to rely on (Thai not English!) sub-titles there are quite a few options out there, not as many as we would like but enough to make headway in our study. Another online teacher I recommend is the lovely June (who hasn't been posting for 3 years now, sob-sob, did she get, as we men say, scooped up?):

 

 

[Gaccha]

9 hours ago, JackGats said:

For intermediate-advanced learners, some teachers of Thai include their own 100% word-for-word sub-titles, like this teacher

 

That is nothing like intermediate- advanced level. There are absolutely no Thai teachers for the level I am talking about. At best, the level you have shown is roughly intermediate- beginner level. About the equivalent of 1-year's very gentle study.

 

Thai language tools obviously mostly target early beginner levels because most people give up long before they make any progress. 

 

By intermediate-advanced I'm talking about the equivalent to the CEFR B2 level for English.

 

In my original post I pointed out that old movies with their dodgy sound quality would obviously be a problem for automatic subtitling. 

 

But if you look at some of the current popular current affair programmes which do use automatic subtitle generation, then they are absolutely fine. Anyone using a 50 dollar mic will cause no problems.