Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default and impossible to disable also needs to be fired

That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful experience that I had never encountered before, nor even imagined.

While we’re at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we now have to click the channel’s mini thumbnail to open it, EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail takes you to the live video where you have to click the thumbnail again.

Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent, defined behavior for probably over a decade before that point.

> That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again

That is a feature (of the browser). The volume bar is selected so it takes up the controls for left/right (this is what a horizontal slider does I suppose). You can also select the volume button and mute/unmute with spacebar (spacebar does the action of the UI element, like click a button). You can tab around the buttons under the video to select options, etc. all with a keyboard. If a control doesn't support an action, it'll be propagated up to the parent, which leads to the jarring feeling that controls are inconsistent (and also the effects, left-right just adjusts the volume, up-down also plays an animation).

It's the usual low quality Google product, but it does make sense why it is so.

Oh, I know why it works that way. The point is that overriding parts of the normal focus behavior makes sense within video players - not only does every function already have a key shortcut (reducing the need for tabbing through every button), but some shortcuts can only work if the player understands what can and can't be overriden. Losing focus on the volume bar for the sake of keeping the arrow key assignments consistent is how it was done. Many other video platforms have figured it out, and so did YouTube many years ago, but then during one of their endless player redesigns, they seem to have simply forgotten about that basic behavior. I have no idea how they allowed it to remain this way for years, with all of them being extremely intelligent and well-paid engineers that are working on probably what is the world's most popular video player UI.

In the meantime "YouTube No Translation" addon fixes the issue. https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/

It works when you watch video on youtube, when it's embedded on other site I get the automatic translation.

I still cannot believe that Google doesn't understand that a person can speak more than one language.

Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as a second language.

Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.

i can assure you, people working there also absolutely hate it as well and there would be celebrations if the responsible people were fired for it.

I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).

There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my local newspaper actively disables it.

This is not always available for some reason

They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.

Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.

Same for auto-translated titles. It's like they can't fathom the idea of people speaking more than one language. At least give an option to turn it off!

ReVanced allows disabling them, and there are extensions for Browsers.

"Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default"

well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on that shit

this is the power of "default", you cant test something is working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube does

Finnish to the rescue:

Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.

not yet

in this age where google has monopoly for content created on the whole world, its just matter of time until they available

Hold on, there is a setting to switch to original audio. Just click the cog wheel on the video.

The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?

The setting does not persist, not even within the same session.

Often times there is no setting to disable this

Is there a setting to disable it globally or has every video to be switched?

Not on web mobile frontend

Interesting! I did not realise this. Just checked and can't see it in that case either.

So, yeah, that's pretty bad.

I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I thought about it....

Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!

Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.

Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.

The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)

If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.

https://www.rickmoranis.com

Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com