Eggcorn of the month

YouTube's speech-to-text system is way behind the state of the art, or maybe has a good sense of humor. From its transcription of Donald Trump's 5/15/2025 speech in Qatar (the whitehouse.gov version):

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A few other (meta-usage) examples of "Pulit suprise" are Out There, but even an old-fashioned bigram language model would know that the right answer is "Pulitzer Prize" — so it's a puzzle why Google's (presumably) LLM-based model screws this up so badly.

And it makes the same choice in other recordings of the same speech, for example this one from Bloomberg:

And that recording's transcript has the same word sequence, but divides the transcript into lines differently — through still in a way that makes no sense, neither in terms of the message content nor in terms of its prosodic delivery. The large variation in line length removes the theory that the goal is a just a certain number of words or characters per line. So again, why this application of Google's language model is so (variably) crappy is a puzzle.

The word error rate is not especially large, but the system makes plenty of other weird choices as well. In its transcription of that particular speech, Trump refers (in a somewhat rambling way) to Sean Duffy. in his role as Secretary of Transportation and also as a former lumberjacking champion. The YouTube transcription of the whitehouse.gov version has his name spelled "Sean" six times and "Shawn" three times. The YouTube transcription of the Bloomberg version uses each spelling five times. (I'm not clear why the totals are different, and don't have time to look into it further — a reader may figure it out for us…)

And here the spelling choices are also slightly different:

Random trawling through YouTube transcripts, as I've done over the years, turns up lots of weird stuff — as one other example, both of the cited trancripts render references to C.C. Wei as "Mr. weey", with a lower-case initial letter as well as a weird spelling, even though the context should make it clear to any Artificial (un)Intelligence that Trump is talking about the head of TSMC.

Maybe somebody from Google can explain what's going on.