Fans of real-time captions weren’t short of news recently, with three developments from real-time classroom captions, to life-with-subtitles apps on smartphones and on Google Glass:
Ai-Media
Firstly, UK-based captioning firm Ai-Media announced backing from Nesta Impact Investments to develop its high-quality live captioning service for students with different learning challenges, while giving teachers real-time feedback on their performance.
Children aged seven to eleven years old and students with autism, dyslexia, learning difficulties or English as an additional language, were noted to be particular beneficiaries of Ai-Media’s service in pilots, due to getting a second look at a lesson in transcript form.
RogerVoice
News of the RogerVoice Kickstarter campaign broke last week, as its founders seek to bring the app’s instant transcription service to a broader population. The Bluetooth-compatible app works in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, English, Italian and Greek, and potentially pairs with a hearing aid for better listening to conversations.
Live subtitles on the RogerVoice VoIP app transcribe the voice you’re hearing on the phone, using a third-party real time service to push the result to your phone. No app or subscription is required by your conversation partner, just by the end-user.
Captions and Google Glass
Glass and Captions were made for each other – or so founder Joel Lu, hopes. Apps based on automatic speech recognition, pattern matching and language-processing bring challenges, not least the monetization factor to ensure service sustainability.
While translations work in German, French, Spanish and Italian in loud settings without noise interference, the team is aiming for a private beta test from January to March 2015.
