Closed Captioning: Lots of Options

by Daniell Krawczyk, Owner, Municipal Captioning

Buy a new car in 2022 and the engine is going to be reliable enough no matter what you buy, but in the early days of automobiles the reliability and quality of the prebuilt engines which “coach manufacturers” built their autos upon varied greatly, and you needed to be aware of which vehicles had a top-tier engine and which had a bottom-tier engine.

Similarly, today server manufacturers are adding captioning inside their products and to lower their own costs they tend to build on the lowest-tier engines (IBM Watson, AWS, Microsoft), but the accuracy results from systems built using the more expensive mid-tier (VoiceInteraction) and top-tier engines (Speechmatics) are substantially better. Especially when it comes to a mix of regional and global accents, audio with crosstalk and background noise, and non-perfectly mic’d speakers.

Learn how to compare 3rd party and playback server captioning options, so you know ahead of time what you are sacrificing for quality if you select a system built on a bottom-tier engine over a product built on a mid or top-tier engine. Municipal Captioning sells products with ALL levels of captioning quality — from the low-budget solutions which trade quality for cost to the highest-quality solutions — and can give you quotes for all options so you can make an informed decision for your community.