[HN Gopher] Live Captioning FAQ
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       Live Captioning FAQ
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2022-10-10 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (whitecoatcaptioning.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (whitecoatcaptioning.com)
        
       | thangngoc89 wrote:
       | By reading the homepage, I can gather that this is a service that
       | offer onsite or online captioning by HUMAN, not by machines.
       | Being a live interpreter at medical conferences myself, I would
       | say these people have mad skills. Listening, translating, and
       | typings live? That's just pure talent.
        
         | extra88 wrote:
         | The "translation" is conversion of the shorthand they type into
         | regular English words and phrases. They're not listening to a
         | different human language and translating it into English.
         | 
         | Doing any live captioning well is challenging, doing it when
         | there is a lot of jargon and variety of speakers even more so.
        
           | thangngoc89 wrote:
           | My bad. I was confusing between captioning and translating to
           | another language
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | I believe there are companies that will offer that, as I've
             | seen "live" English captioning of someone speaking another
             | language.
        
       | manv1 wrote:
       | Live captioning (not subtitles) is quite difficult. We'll be
       | contacting these guys next year, as FCC-level captioning is a
       | requirement for some of our customers...and as time goes on, the
       | FCC will probably require captioning for VoD and live streams.
       | 
       | I'm surprised nobody's hit YT etc for violating the
       | ADA...although they do have automatic subtitling, which may
       | satisfy the requirements.
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | >I'm surprised nobody's hit YT etc for violating the ADA.
         | 
         | Does YT fall under ADA? It's not a broadcasting platform. It is
         | user generated content. Not sure if that falls under ADA
         | either.
         | 
         | I've been part of teams scrambling to populate back catalog
         | content with captioning (not-subs. they're not the same) for
         | existing streaming content. Lots of 3rd parties involved, lots
         | of buying of software to handle volume when 3rd parties become
         | too expensive, etc. The cheat was to turn subtitles into
         | captioning, but not doing the actual information for the hard
         | of hearing.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | Youtube asks you some questions when uploading, and the
           | detail they have clearly indicates that they are trying to
           | avoid closed-captioning requirements (and their best-effort
           | auto-captioning is trying to be good enough that they don't
           | get hit with requirements).
           | 
           | I would NOT be surprised if they go back and manually correct
           | captions on very popular videos.
           | 
           | https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3068031?hl=en might
           | be a place to start
        
       | kevinbowman wrote:
       | I've been to a few events where White Coat have been doing the
       | captioning, and they're very good. I often find myself reading
       | the live captions even whilst I'm listening to the speaker, I
       | think my brain sometimes finds it easier to follow along with
       | (e.g. to lighten the cognitive load a little if the speaker has a
       | strong accent which I'm not tuned-in to very well). Live
       | captioning is highly recommended for all sizeable events, and
       | White Coat seem to be pretty good at it (I have no relationship
       | with them, just encountered them a couple of times).
        
         | charliepark wrote:
         | I saw them at RemixConf and was completely blown away by how
         | well they nailed it. Technical terms, acronyms, and even non-
         | technical quirks of the speaker (like one who said "regular-
         | degular HTML") and the captioner didn't miss a beat.
         | 
         | (Similarly no relation to them, but I passed their contact info
         | along to our events team after seeing them in action and hope
         | my company followed up with them.)
        
       | goldbattle wrote:
       | I recently saw this great plugin for OBS which uses Google Speech
       | Recognition api to stream captions to twitch along with your
       | video. Not sure about the quality or delay.
       | 
       | https://github.com/ratwithacompiler/OBS-captions-plugin
       | 
       | https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/closed-captioning-via...
        
       | 1-6 wrote:
       | I oftentimes wonder if there's any way to have a system where a
       | ML inferencer does the majority of the captioning work and a
       | volunteer can pickup the various spots where it went wrong.
       | 
       | Basically, each word that has a low prediction value can show
       | multiple choice options and the volunteer simply chooses the
       | correct word on a number pad.
       | 
       | Hiring a real person sounds expensive so I'm trying to target a
       | 100-500 people audience with a service that costs $0-10 per day.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | The problem is the delay - if you're going live, the human
         | barely has time to notice the error before it's off the screen.
         | 
         | If everything is delayed a bit, it could work.
         | 
         | What I've seen is ML for the "live show" and then you fix the
         | transcript for the recording.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-10 23:02 UTC)