[Curzel]

Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare

[KMag]

My wife is a native Thai speaker, fluent in English, but if the speaker is speaking quickly and not clearly, it's very frustrating for her to follow along (especially if the speakers themselves are non-native speakers, or speaking with an Australian accent). Most of the automated subtitles on Youtube seem heavily biased toward high-school level vocabulary, so if the speaker is using more rare words, making literary references, or using some of the more common Latin / Greek / French phrases imported into English (medical/technical terminology, etc.), the subtitles can be very misleading. The automated subtitles are also generally garbage at catching proper nouns, often replacing them with rhyming phrases of common words.

At least the garbage is pretty consistent, so I can pause the videa and tell my wife that the phrase X Y Z in the subtitles is actually A B. (The number of syllables is almost always correct, but often the number of words is not.)

On a side note, it's not YouTube, and it's translation instead of strait subtitling, but I've seen some pretty bad English subtitles for Netflix's La Casa de Papel (Money Heist). I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I do remember a few times the translations were very odd and I realized the translator was translating a person's surname from Spanish into its English meaning, and not capitalizing it. It would have been just fine leaving the name untranslated, as my wife and I could both clearly make out the names of the characters. I presume a human translator would know not to translate names. I hope the subtitles I saw were third-party subtitles where someone ran Spanish subtitles through Google Translate.

[Tainnor]

Why do you think it's rare to want to watch something in a foreign language?

For the vast majority of people on this planet, English is not their first language (if they speak it al all), and their command of English may often not be good enough to comfortably understand all of the content they might want to enjoy. And it's still the case that most content on such platforms, and certainly often the most viral one, is in English.

And even beyond that, people sometimes learn other languages, in which case watching something in the target language with subtitles can be a very helpful step.

[ohgodplsno]

If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless.

Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.

[iagovar]

If you speak multiple languages (which isn't uncommon out of the anglosphere) it becomes very annoying to have YT putting subtitles and translating stuff for you.

If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.

[Tainnor]

The automated video title translation "feature" is really fast turning me off YouTube. It's just confusing as hell to see a German title and then realise the video is actually in English.

[rjsw]

English is my first language and I don't want automatic subtitles or translation for stuff in other languages.

[robin_reala]

To be honest, YouTube’s captioning struggles with even British accents.

[jobigoud]

Another use case is when you want to watch a video without the audio to avoid bothering the people around.

Auto closed captions quality depend on the language and the locutor. It works well for "presentation" content like vlogs and news, it fails for casual discussion or songs.