Educational lectures have been moving online for many reasons. The most obvious is the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced learning out of classrooms and into the home to keep students safe. There’s also the “flipping the classroom” trend to make online lectures available to students prior to scheduled lessons, and then use class time to hone their understanding through face-to-face instruction or group activities.
Universities and colleges routinely extend the reach of their teachers and programs well beyond their local campus. This increases revenues while giving remote students the opportunity to earn credits and degrees from their institutions. There’s also eLearning, which enables people to capitalize on online courses and training for business or personal edification. And, beyond the educational arena, people increasingly watch online videos anywhere, anytime, often with the captions on as a courtesy to others, as well as for better information retention.
Whatever the reason for online learning may be, one thing is germane to all, and that’s the need to provide captioning—on-screen text displays in sync with the spoken word—to give deaf and hard of hearing viewers greater accessibility to audio/video-based instruction. The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) mandates the captioning of publicly shared videos.
While the ENCO enCaption system has been around for years, the need has never been greater for its automated conversion of speech to text within just two to four seconds. This compact, Windows-based appliance achieves 99% accuracy because it learns the correct spellings of local names, places, and terms based on user input, and maintains a custom library.
For live online lectures, enCaption takes audio from your SDI or NDI signal, creates the text file, and feeds it to a closed captioning encoder, which embeds the captions into the video stream. The encoder can be a third-party device or a card solution that ENCO offers.
If, however, you have an archive of lectures that need captioning, enCaption has a file-based mode for automatically captioning pre-recorded content. enCaption makes accurate, automated captioning is available to users on-premises, 24/7, and faster and more cost-effectively than third-party human captioning services.
