Use Real-Time Captions for Your Business Zoom Sessions

Live captioning has made the virtual world connect more profoundly with captions and event recaps in the form of transcripts.

When hosting virtual events and sessions on Zoom and other platforms, the need of the hour is real-time captioning to make your session accessible and inclusive.

Earlier this year, Zoom rolled out closed captioning support to even free accounts to make the service more accessible. This was a boon for those working from home, attending virtual events and conferences, and figuring out newer ways of collaborating in the pandemic era.

Accuracy in subtitling and inclusivity via multi-lingual captions have made captioning the go-to service for virtual events. In this article, we delve into the world of real-time captions.

What Are Live Captions?

Everything spoken during a live event, a virtual event, a seminar, or a hybrid event (real-time + virtual) can be captured in live captions.

They are powered either by human captioners or by AI technology such as ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and accessible via internet-enabled devices e.g., smartphone, a computer, or a tablet.

Positives for Media File Transcribing

A media file (audio, video, or podcasts) gets transcribed to satisfy several end goals:

• Better comprehension for people who are hard of hearing
• Maintain records of the event in a simplified text format
• Downloadable transcripts for those unable to attend live
• Add another layer of accessibility for those who might want to consume the content in their native/preferred languages

Why Use Live Captions for your Zoom session

With Zoom’s roaring success in the past year, it has become even more critical for companies that enjoy a global presence to activate captions and translations for live events.

Translating a Zoom event into specific languages opens up the world further, allowing people to consume and witness these events in the languages closest to home. From a business perspective, this makes sense from a comprehension and application standpoint.

Plus, content consumption has pivoted to vocabulary in the digital space, with regional content players ruling the roost, so this is another reason to use live captions in your video content.

More Accessibility

Now that Zooming had become the de facto verb of the year, it necessitated a next logical step. This step was a massive advantage for multitaskers who must participate in the meetings while taking notes.

Remote working

While it may seem strange to some to consider reading through captions during a Zoom event, you’ll be surprised at how imperative it becomes in the home office context. It can be a lifesaver to those whose attention may be divided while juggling both office and home responsibilities from home.

Plus, activating the captions during a Zoom call via the meeting controls is easy, so there’s no interruption to the live event.

The captions allow you to scroll through the parts you may have missed. You can also download session transcripts, a feature that closed captioning services provide.

AI Captions Are Catching Up

Human captions versus AI live captions, which is more accurate? (Hint: Not AI)

Google introduced its Live Captioning in 2019. While automatic speech recognition has many advantages in logistics, there is still a tiny gap between humanss and AI. For example, machines don’t understand languages, inflection, tone, nuances in speech, and humans.

Human captioners

Human captioners have greater adherence to accuracy in capturing speech. Human captioners are skilled at deciphering human speech and precisely reproducing the words they hear. Human-generated captions have greater accuracy, up to 99%, compared to AI-generated captions for this very reason.

AI

AI technology works to bridge that gap between speech and captioned text; it is the future – just not yet!

Summary

Zoom now only allows users to send one language to their platform. Before the event begins, the host can determine which language captions to use.

However, rather than just one language, you can get multi-lingual captions with a captioning service like SyncWords. Plus, their blog has a guide to activating captions for Zoom: Zoom Real-Time Captions.

So, if you’re thinking Zoom, think real-time captions and what they can do for you and your business.