Southfield, MI, March 7, 2018 – For broadcasters that find it increasingly difficult and costly to arrange for live captioning services, ENCO will showcase its ground-breaking enCaption family of automated closed captioning solutions at the 2018 NAB Show. New updates to ENCO’s latest enCaption4 system, further strengthened through ENCO’s new patent for automated captioning, significantly raise the bar for speed and accuracy in live captioning environments.
enCaption4 delivers immediate on-air impact in news, sports and other live programming by surpassing the speed of professional human captioners. This higher speed benchmark closes the gap between live speech and the corresponding caption display for an overall improved viewer experience.
Key technical differentiators also bring substantial improvements across accuracy, newsroom integration and speaker identification. enCaption4’s latest enhancements boost accuracy to 90% or higher, which far surpasses compliancy requirements in live captioning. These accuracy improvements are born through enCaption4’s advanced speech-to-text engine, which leverages breakthroughs in machine learning technology to develop a deep neural network approach to voice recognition.
New for NAB is enhanced integration to Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) MOS integration. This further improves accuracy by empowering enCaption4 to learn correct spellings from news scripts and rundowns prior to live newscasts, and without manual intervention. Additionally, enCaption4’s multi-speaker identification speaker eliminates crosstalk and other on-air confusion when multiple hosts and guests are contributing to live broadcasts. enCaption4 identifies speech from each speaker through dedicated microphones, and processes each speaker separately.
The flexibility of enCaption4’s deployment options within automated production workflows also ensures optimal cost-efficiency and operational flexibility. And with support for more than 20 languages, enCaption4 stands alone as the industry’s most affordable, flexible and versatile captioning solution for dynamic, high-pressure live production environments.
“Whether it’s deployed on-premises or as a cloud-based solution, enCaption4 is ready to go whenever the need for captioning arises, at a fraction the cost of live captioning services,” said Ken Frommert, president, ENCO. “It is by far the most powerful captioning solution available today, and is unrivaled across speed, accuracy and performance.”
Frommert adds that should broadcasters need to cut into a regularly scheduled program with breaking news or weather alerts, finding qualified live captioners to step in on short notice is often difficult to do.
“Since closed captioning on broadcast TV is legally mandated, our customers remain in compliance and avoid costly penalties - all while offering better service to their hearing-impaired viewers,” he said. “This simply amplifies our unparalleled value proposition.”
Cloud Service
Visitors to ENCO’s booth will absorb on-going product demonstrations and a detailed video presentation that highlight the many innovative ways that broadcasters use enCaption4 to caption their newscasts, talk shows, events coverage, and other live and recorded programs. This includes non-live rebroadcasts, including re-runs and online distribution, for which the FCC expects higher accuracy.
ENCO meets this challenge by now offering file-based (non-live) transcription as a cloud-based captioning service that guarantees 99% accuracy. To be debuted at NAB the cloud transcription workflow accelerates the uploading of recorded programs, which are immediately made available to a professional transcription service. This ensures that the transcriptionist can quickly generate an accurate transcript of the audio. The resulting transcripts are made accessible from the cloud within two to eight hours, depending upon how quickly the captioned content is needed to achieve proper compliance.
About ENCO
Founded in 1983, ENCO pioneered the use of computer-based, digital audio and program automation for radio station and TV studios. The company has since evolved its product line to cross all aspects of today’s automated broadcast and production workflows, including closed-captioning, visual radio, audio compliance, instant media playout, remote contribution, and cloud-based web streaming. Its two flagship systems, DAD and MOM, bring the industry’s best reliability, cost-efficiency and intuitive operation to automated radio and TV operations worldwide. ENCO is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan USA and retains a global distribution network, plus a growing network of partnerships with complementary industry vendors. For more information, please visit: www.enco.com.
