They are often incomprehensible and useless.
Summary:
- Crunchyroll is finally adding closed captions for dubbed series.
- This is supposed to increase accessibility, but these captions are autogenerated.
- Because of these, they make no sense at all.
After many years of fan requests, Crunchyroll started rolling out closed captions for their dubbed series. This is actually great news: closed captions help with accessibility, as they are great for those who have troubles hearing.
However, fans don’t believe Crunchyroll is doing a good job — and that’s because they are likely using automatically generated captions.
Captions Are Made Using Speech-to-Text Recognition Software
More specifically, the script itself is not AI-generated. The captions are still done for the dub script, which is definitely written by humans. Still, the captions look like they have been made using AI voice recognition — which makes fans wonder why that has been done.
Technically, for many of these shows, Crunchyroll already has a full dub script. There’s no reason not to just put it into the closed captions, because that will definitely represent the dialogue more correctly. Some fans, however, believe that it’s done to save time: it’s easier to run software that recognizes speech and puts it into text.
Others wonder why closed captions are even needed — because, after all, subs already exist. Closed captions are different, though: the dub script is often significantly different from the sub script.
Besides, they help with accessibility: if you watch with friends and you like your anime dubbed, but one of your friends is hard of hearing, they are an absolute necessity.
Even the Songs Get These Terrible Captions
The Crunchyroll closed captions are often really bad. Even Solo Leveling (Ore dake Level Up na Ken), arguably the biggest new anime of Winter 2024, has these extremely poor closed captions which add extra lines and miss some actual speech.
Speech-to-text recognition software is not perfect — far from that, in fact — and it’s understandable why such a big platform using it upsets the fans.
But it actually gets much, much worse from here. While these captions still get things right every now and then when they recognize actual speech. However, Crunchyroll has done absolutely no editing for these, and they ran them for every episode… which included opening and ending themes.
As such, now we get English closed captions for openings and endings that are sung in Japanese. And they are AI-generated. And not only Crunchyroll hasn’t edited them, they haven’t even bothered removing them — the captions for OP/ED themes seem to recognize English words in Japanese lyrics.
The result is, as expected, complete nonsense. In the end, this is yet another terrible decision by Crunchyroll that they only made to cut the costs.