Live Captioning & Transcription

As more videos, events and courses are live streamed to audiences, live captions should be considered. Captions produced in real-time while the video is happening help viewers to participate more effectively while remote or in environments where the sound can’t be played out loud. Captions also help to deliver accessibility to audiences who rely on them to consume your content and participate in your events. Both captions and transcriptions reinforce the content which is being shared verbally for greater audience engagement and information retention.

Individuals with disabilities, such as those with hearing loss and who are members of the Deaf community, rely on live captioning and audio transcription to participate in events, courses and livestreams. Audiences who are watching in a non-native language can also benefit from access to captions, as well as those who are commuting or are watching without headphones. Many events, schools and businesses are subject to meeting accessibility guidelines, such as the ADA, and can even be sued if accessibility technologies like closed captioning services are not offered on their videos and live events.

Live captions and live transcripts are both produced as word-for-word records of the spoken word. Captions appear on screen in shorter segments that are meant to match the speaker as they speak or with a slight delay. Transcripts provide all of the text together in one longer-form format, which also helps to serve as a form of notes which can be searched and referenced after a live event takes place. Both formats offer accessibility to individuals with disabilities, among others, and offer an additional resource via a visual cue to consume live video content more effectively.

In order to make videos accessible, captions and transcripts must be accurate. When captions are inaccurate they harm the viewer experience and can cause miscommunications. Equity can only be provided when the captions and transcripts being produced reach high accuracy levels, which Verbit’s solutions do. Free tools often miss the mark and do not use professional human editors in the process due to the cost associated with them. Verbit offers word-for-word accurate transcripts produced by Artificial Intelligence and fact checked by professional transcribers to reach targeted 99% accuracy to users through cost-efficient means.

When considering real time captioning solutions and providers, event organizers, content creators, instructors and employers should look for accuracy, efficiency and integrations. The process can be manual and ineffective when captions being delivered are inaccurate and need to be corrected or don’t appear within the platform itself, such as Zoom. Verbit integrates into every web conferencing and video platform universities, businesses and media companies are using to ensure the captions are ‘pushed and pulled’ wherever they are needed without any manual work or effort by our users.