I was just reviewing a video we're about to publish, and I noticed something in the subtitles. It said, "Six qubits are used for..."

I got all excited thinking RavenDB was jumping into quantum computing. But nope, it turned out to be a transcription error. What was actually said was, "Six kilobytes are used for..."

To be fair, I listened to the recording a few times, and honestly, "qubits" isn't an unreasonable interpretation if you're just going by the spoken words. Even with context, that transcription isn't completely out there. I wouldn't be surprised if a human transcriber came up with the same result.

Fixing this issue (and going over an hour of text transcription to catch other possible errors) is going to be pretty expensive. Honestly, it would be easier to just skip the subtitles altogether in that case.

Here's the thing, though. I think a big part of this is that we now expect transcription to be done by a machine, and we don't expect it to be perfect. Before, when it was all done manually, it cost so much that it was reasonable to expect near-perfection.

What AI has done is make it cheap enough to get most of the value, while also lowering the expectation that it has to be flawless.

So, the choices we're looking at are:

• AI transcription - mostly accurate, cheap, and easy to do.
• Human transcription - highly accurate, expensive, and slow.
• No transcription - users who want subtitles would need to use their own automatic transcription (which would probably be lower quality than what we use).

Before, we really only had two options: human transcription or nothing at all. What I think the spread of AI has done is not just made it possible to do it automatically and cheaply, but also made it acceptable that this "Good Enough" solution is actually, well, good enough.

Viewers know it's a machine translation, and they're more forgiving if there are some mistakes. That makes it way more practical to actually use it. And the end result? We can offer more content.

Sure, it's not as good as manual transcription, but it's definitely better than having no transcription at all (which is really the only other option).

What I find most interesting is that it's the fact that this is so common now that makes it possible to actually use it more.

Yes, we actually review the subtitles and fix any obvious mistakes for the video. The key here is that we can spend very little time actually doing that, since errors are more tolerated.