There are in the market many free options to add subtitles to your videos, and many of them can produce subtitles that are useful to get the basics of what is said on screen.
But automated subtitling presents many issues. On the technical side, they cause lots of issues due to the lack of synchrony and difficulties to be read, due to their formatting (or lack thereof), of an unsuitable word/minute rate for easy reading. Not to mention transcription mistakes. We all know by experience what may happen when a voicemail is automatically transcribed into text…
On the other hand, there are a myriad of aspects that the automated programs do not cover: precision, technical or local terminology and cultural adaptation of puns, expressions and references, which is needed for the watcher to really understand what is happening on the screen.
A separate type of subtitling is the one including closed captions for accessibility, addressed to the deaf or people with hearing disabilities. They are often regulated. In Spain they follow UNE 153010. They support understanding of the visual text by adding extra information about non-verbal details (sound effects, speaker identification, music description…).
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