In October 2021, Zoom made automated captions, also known as live transcription, a feature available to all Zoom accounts. The feature is designed to improve accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing by providing a live transcription of what's being said.
As a Zoom meeting host, you can choose from two live captioning options:
Manual captions: you assign a meeting participant as a captioner, who will transcribe the speech live. This requires a person who has experience captioning live speech – a skill that requires training and experience.
Automated captions: Here, the audio of the meeting is used to automatically create captions. Zoom also provides auto-translated captions so users can access captions in another language than English in real time.
At the time of writing, Zoom offers its automated captioning in twelve languages – three languages are in beta – and notes that there are limitations.
As Zoom points out, “The accuracy of the automated captions depends on many variables, such as but not limited to background noise, volume and clarity of the speaker’s voice, and lexicons and dialects specific to geography or community.”
Because of these limitations, Zoom recommends that companies use a professional language services provider to ensure a specific level of accuracy, especially if you need to use speech-to-text support in your meetings and webinars for compliance or accessibility reasons.
That is why at Interprenet we offer our clients enhanced AI live captioning on Zoom. When using our speech-to-text engine on Zoom, clients can benefit from a dictionary tool that populates the engine with names, acronyms, or technical terms to be transcribed or auto-translated with the highest accuracy.
Zoom also has limitations when it comes to auto-translated captions. As of March 2023, Zoom only offers translation from English into these eleven languages: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese (Simplified) (Beta), Russian, Japanese (Beta), Korean (Beta), Dutch, Ukrainian.
At Interprenet, we use best-performing machine translation engines to provide multilingual live captioning in over 100 language combinations.
With Interprenet, Zoom sessions can be streamed with accurate live captions in more languages than the native Zoom feature offers. We also provide real-time translations of live captions into multiple languages for our clients around the world.
• Setting up a glossary before the event to prepare the system for all important terms
• 100+ language combinations available for live multilingual captioning
• Dedicated setup and technical support
• Interprenet Captions uses the best translation engines for each language combination
• Additional language support: Flexibly combine interpretation with automatic and/or translated captions and record your sessions for post-event usage.
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