Customer story

Live Captioning for Houses of Worship

Learn how Verbit's live captioning solution, Captivate™, helped a non-denominational chapel connect with all members and ensure no one was left out of the spiritual experience.

A row of empty pews in a dimly lit house of worship

Quick Overview

At its core, a house of worship’s mission is to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for every member of its congregation. However, without accessible solutions in place, individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing can often find themselves missing important messages in sermons or community interactions.

Verbit recently introduced our live captioning solution, Captivate™, to a non-denominational church, transforming its ability to connect with all members and ensuring that no one is left out of the spiritual experience.

The challenge

A large Missouri-based church was looking for a way to better connect with its growing congregation. Though the church had audio-visual equipment and live-streaming technology in place, it needed a solution that would enable it to effectively, efficiently and affordably reach all its faith-based community, including its deaf and hard-of-hearing members.

The solution

Part of our Venue Live offering, Captivate enables churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship to be more inclusive and engaging to all congregants.

Developed by captioning, speech and machine-learning experts, Captivate provides a seamless, cost-efficient way to live caption without sacrificing accuracy. Simply provide a clean source of audio and our live captioning technology will display captions on video screens, monitors, virtual streaming platforms and even personal mobile devices via QR code.

Importantly, our AI-driven solution is trained on the names, terms and phrases that are important to you so that you never have to worry about an awkward or uncomfortable typo appearing on the screen. In many cases, customers provide advanced prep materials to further improve caption accuracy while our expert teams monitor caption outputs.

The results

Verbit’s captioning, transcription and audio description solutions help faith-based organizations and communities expand their reach and provide a more inclusive and engaging experience for all congregations. Our tools make it easy for large houses of worship, small congregations and everyone in between to connect with members who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or with low vision, non-native speakers or have varying communication needs.

Equality for all

The impact has been immediate and meaningful. The church successfully implemented live captioning to better serve its deaf and hard-of-hearing parishioners, fostering a more inclusive worship setting where everyone, regardless of hearing ability, can fully engage with the messages being shared.

We speak your language

Our AI captioning solution is trained using diverse language models, enabling it to understand languages, accents and speech patterns better than ordinary speech-to-text engines. It also can provide captions and translations in more than 30 languages.

“It’s been a game changer,” said one church leader. “People are now consistently attending, and the accuracy — even with complex Greek and Hebrew words — has been amazing!”

Easy integration

Our captions integrated directly with church’s existing live video streaming software (vMix), enabling church leaders to seamlessly stream live captions without changing their workflow. Additionally, staff have retained the ability to toggle captions on and off and adjust formatting as needed and have access to our dedicated customer support teams.

Future growth and cost-savings

The response to the addition of live captions has been positive and the church has seen an increase in usage and requests as its congregation grows more reliant on captions. Officials are now considering using a captioning subscription model to continue reaching members and save money.

Verbit offers a variety of flexible pricing options for captioning, transcription and translation to help organizations scale affordably – including a subscription plan that covers your access needs at one low annual price. With it, customers spend less time worrying about the fluctuating costs of accessibility and more time providing inclusive, engaging messages for their community.

Enhanced experiences for all

What began as a way to support congregants who are deaf and hard-of-hearing quickly evolved into a tool that enhances the worship experience for everyone. Using Verbit, the church proved that accessibility doesn’t have to be complicated or costly and that investing in captions can strengthen community bonds, boost attendance and ensure every voice and message is truly heard.

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