Rebecca-Anne Withey: Review of Ai-Media captioning and transcription

Ai-Media, founded in 2003, offers a wide range of services aimed at making the world of media accessible for deaf and hard of hearing people.

These services include live captioning, closed captioning transcribing, subtitles and audio description. (Disclosure: they’re also a long-running supporter of this site!)

I was kindly given the opportunity to review their live captioning and transcribing service and so I invited Ai-Media to join me on a Zoom seminar.

Prior to the meeting I sent the captioning team the Zoom log in and password details to join the event (with the speakers permission, of course) and I was asked to send over any relevant information such as seminar topics or background reading.

As I was joining a broad discussion linked to holistic therapy, I was unable to provide any specific notes aside from the topics that we hoped to cover.

Ai-Media then sent me a unique URL to click on to read the live captions from. There were no complicated log in details, just a simple link. I decided to use two devices for this; a laptop to watch the Zoom meeting on and an iPad to read the live captions. You can, if you prefer, watch both on one screen if you minimise the size of the Zoom call.

As I entered the virtual Zoom meeting room I could see the caption writers present with their cameras off and my URL link suddenly came to life. The captions were presented in paragraphs according to who was saying what with the speakers name before any text. My screen looked almost identical to the image below.

 

As I was introduced to the Zoom participants – all hearing people – I was amazed by the speed at which the captioning appeared. Whole sentences flowed effortlessly on my screen in extremely fast timing. This meant the delay between the speaker addressing me and me typing back my answer was very minimal.

I had wondered how the live captions would look and pondered whether they would be similar to a Text Relay call, where you see letter by letter, live spelling mistakes and corrections. But in all honesty, the fluidity of the captions from Ai-Media was much more similar to pre-recorded subtitles on the television. Impressive, indeed!

Throughout the Zoom meeting the participants and I would often refer to books or terminology that we had come across in our studies. I was most surprised to see the captions state the book titles and author names without a single error. This was incredible considering the amount of typos that I usually see on live captions in mainstream media and the lack of background information I sent the captioning team.

It was also evident that whilst there was someone typing the captions, I could also see slight alterations being made to previous paragraphs, amendments to the grammar and appropriate commas and hyphens being added throughout the session. This attention to detail felt slick and professional.

Comparing this experience with other live text relay services, there was also no requirement for direct conversation with the captioners such as those infamous ‘notes from operator.’  Instead, when I messaged the media team to say I was leaving the meeting early, they simply typed End of Captions and the service ceased.

I was also forwarded the transcript for the session very quickly and I was told if I provided them with a recording of the meeting they would be able to add subtitles to the recording too.

Upon reflection, I feel I would have found this service especially useful when I was on a course during a period of employment as the speed at which the live captions work and the accuracy they produce is far beyond what any of my manual note takers could have provided.

Another bonus to having their service is that you can keep the transcript to refer back to if needed. So, even if you use a BSL interpreter to access live lectures or workshops, I can imagine that having live captions too would enable you to have valuable notes via the transcript that you can refer back to for reference.

On another note I must say that whilst the captions alone provide you with full access to discussions and information, you still need to ensure you are able to get your own ‘voice heard.’ This could be perhaps by letting the group know that you will be typing up your contributions in the Zoom group chat, using voice or signing through a BSL interpreter.

The captions are ideal for receiving information clearly but if you want to be an active participant in a Zoom discussion or online workshop then you still need to ensure you have a way of being understood by the speaker and group however you wish to communicate.

This live captioning service is approved by Access to Work so if you wanted to use this service as part of your employment support you can contact Ai-Media and let them know. All they would need is access to the audio needing to be live captioned – usually via a web link or Zoom meeting – and confirmation as to how long the session is and from what time.

The rate for the live captioning is per hour and varies according to the event, workflow and display needed so I would highly recommend getting in touch with Ai-Media directly or simply signing up for live captions here: https://www.ai-live.com/sign-up/

On the whole, I would absolutely recommend the live captioning service by Ai-Media for its graceful fluidity, speed, clarity and professionalism. I was also very pleased with the swift email liaison and the feeling of ease by which they work.

You can find out more about Ai-Media and the services they provide on the Ai-Media website https://www.ai-media.tv/