AI captions are a first pass, not a final pass

AI caption accuracy has genuinely improved — well-reviewed tools now claim 95-99% accuracy on clean, single-speaker audio. That's high enough to trust as a first pass on most solo-creator content without much second-guessing.

The accuracy story changes with real-world conditions: multi-speaker clips, background noise, and overlapping dialogue all pull accuracy down meaningfully, with some tools dropping from the high-90s on clean audio into the high-80s on a noisier or multilingual clip. Podcast and multi-guest streaming content sits squarely in that harder category, not the easy one.

Since most viewers watch with sound off, a caption error isn't a small cosmetic miss — it's the entire message landing wrong for a chunk of the audience that never hears the correct version at all. A misheard name, number, or punchline in a caption can undercut a clip that was otherwise well-cut.

The practical workflow that holds up: let AI captioning do the first pass on every clip, but budget a real proofread — a couple of minutes per clip — on anything with more than one speaker or rough audio, rather than treating auto-captions as done the moment they're generated.