I was just now checking out a video recording that Lenny Murphy, founding partner at Gen2 Advisors and the GreenBook blog‘s head honcho (that is, I don’t know what his title there is) made of a chat he and I had about social media, market research, and sentiment analysis technologies. (GreenBook is a media sponsor of my up-coming Sentiment Analysis Symposium, May 7-8, 2013 in New York.) I was checking out the recording on YouTube, of course bought by Google back in 2006, and…
I tried out the Transcript function. What a laugh. See for yourself:
YouTube video, “Interview with Social Media/Text Analytics Guru Seth Grimes”
And the YouTube/Google-generated transcript:
That’s one minute’s worth. There’s more, another 20+ minutes of witty repartee between Lenny and me, egregiously mistranscribed. You can produce the transcript for yourself by going to the non-embedded video and clicking the Transcript button .
Don’t get me wrong: I hugely appreciate all the amazing things Google does for us for free. (Yeah, yeah, I know: “If you don’t pay for a service, you’re the product, not the customer.”) You can even hear me praise Google in my chat with Lenny. But I have to say, it’s a relief that there are things Google isn’t great at. I just hope that whoever implemented YouTube speech transcription isn’t working on Google’s self-driving car project.