Expert User Opinions on "Automatic Captioning"

[jesse_the_k]

MerylKEvans is a Deaf digital marketing professional — she’s been online since 1993, and she’s been on countless video calls. Here’s her take on the best in automatic speech recognition-driven captions, as of 22 April 2020:

https://meryl.net/best-automatic-captioning-tool-for-video-calls

Sadly, there’s no handy tl;dr recommendation.

For one-on-one calls, Meryl — who speaks for herself and describes herself as a strong lipreader — had the best luck with Google Meet. She dives deep into the vexed question of how to get a meeting’s audio directed to the captioning software when you’ve plugged in your microphone to participate in the meeting.

For autocaptioning video events, there’s no clear winner as summarized at the end of Meryl’s article.

Meryl mentions this site spun up in response to the pandemic by two professionals who rely on captioning. They also declare no winner, while providing lots of links to more resources.

http://connect-hear.com/article-categories/captioning

Meryl’s made hundreds of YouTube videos, including this pungent 42-second opinion on whether autocaptions are better than none:

https://youtu.be/ukJfzPdiHB8

( YouTube embed and transcript )