ULTECH LLC, a media access technology company and closed caption industry veteran owned by the National Captioning Institute (NCI) Foundation, has introduced a speech-to-text captioning system called CaptionBot. Optimized to generate emergency broadcast captioning, CaptionBot produces captions directly from a broadcast talent’s speech audio by recognizing the talent’s speech patterns.
“CaptionBot will significantly advance NCI’s mission of providing access to those who need it, particularly in critical emergency situations,” said NCI Chairman Dr. Gene Chao.
CaptionBot’s goal is to provide emergency closed captioning during severe weather, natural disasters, and other life-threatening events. The biggest challenge in providing that today is to secure the services of a captioning agency on short notice. In contrast, CaptionBot sits in the broadcast studio and may be activated immediately.
ULTECH will release a full newsroom version that recognizes speech from up to six newscasters simultaneously later this year.
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