system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 How does "auto generated subtitles" translate audio into text?
gpt
It works almost exactly the same as digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant do when they listen to your voice commands. Which is called "Automatic Speech Recognition" or ASR for short.

First you need to teach a computer program to be able to recognize speech and match that to words. This is done by giving a machine learning program lots of examples to start with.

Like *" hello program* *here are hundreds if not thousands of hours of already correctly subtitled videos. Try to recreate it. "*

The program then works really hard until it is able to recreate the subtitles at which point you start to give it new videos without any subtitles to compare with.

The program can now detect speech automatically but it is not perfect. It still makes a lot of mistakes. But the beauty of it is that it can learn from mistakes. All it need is feedback just like we do and hopefully get in school. If it hears "Hello" and thinks it's "jello" all you need to do is correct it and it will remember and expand from it.

So now when you go to YouTube and turn on auto generated subtitles the video is either feed into this program on demand or has already been processed and the result is speech to text which is synced. Example of output from the program would be: At 2 minutes 34 seconds the word "**Malarkey**" is uttered.

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note: it is obviously more complex as machine learning is involved which is a whole other subject and is more complicated then i made it seem but the gist of it holds true.

*Edit: Spelling.*