Closed Captioning & Subtitling Software & Services

Real-time Closed Captioning Software for

PowerPoint® Classrooms Sporting Events

Broadcast TV Online Meetings Religious Services

 

Advanced Speech Recognition Technology

No stenographer or hardware encoder required

YouCaption Brochure (PDF)

YouCaption Press Release (PDF)

YouCaption Manual (PDF)

---

About Live Captioning

The main challenge with live captioning is how to get the spoken speech turned into text with sufficient accuracy. Even the fastest typists using a regular keyboard (around 120 words per minute) cannot keep up with most human speech (which typically ranges from 150 to 300 WPM).

The three main approaches used for live captioning are:

• Stenographer (like a court reporter): a highly skilled person who enters the text using a special shorthand keyboard. Because of the years of practice it takes to learn this skill, this service tends to be rather expensive, however it is the best option when utmost accuracy is required.
• YouCaption: To get sufficient accuracy (90%+), YouCaption needs to be trained to a specific person’s voice. The training only takes about 20 minutes, but it means that the software can only recognize one speaker’s voice at a time. You can train as many profiles as you'd like and switch profiles to another speaker, but it does take some time (about 15 seconds) to switch.
• YouCaption with a Shadow Speaker: A person acts like a live interpreter, listens to what other people are saying, then repeats it in their own voice. Since their own voice is trained in YouCaption, they can get very good accuracy. This way you can voice caption a live event even if there are multiple speakers. Most people can learn this skill with some practice.

For more info please see: Steno vs. Speech Recognition closed captioning.

---

How YouCaption Works

Captions from Speech - Instantly!

YouCaption’s advanced approach to speech recognition captioning provides accurate results with minimal lag or buffering time. Simply spend a few minutes training the software to your voice. Then speak naturally, and your speech instantly appears as captions. Multiple speakers can be trained, and you can switch between speaker profiles if you need to change speakers during a presentation.

---

Live Presentations for Classrooms & Events

YouCaption displays live closed captions on your computer screen or projector. No need to set up expensive and complicated broadcast TV equipment. A closed captions window is overlaid on your screen -- just like TV closed captions that everyone is accustomed to. The captions work with presentation software such as PowerPoint, and can be customized and moved around the screen for maximum impact with minimum intrusion.

---

Webinars & Online Meetings

If you use a screen sharing system such as Adobe Connect®, WebEx®, GoToMeeting®, TeamViewer®, etc., you can include the closed captions window as part of your shared screen. Now your webinars and online meetings can be ADA and Section 508 compliant, and reach a broader audience without recurring fees for captioning.

---

Web Sites & Mobile Devices

The captions can also be directed to a live web page which can be viewed on virtually all web browsers, including smart phones and tablets, with no special software or plug-ins needed. This is ideal for reaching a mobile or remote audience, especially when bandwidth may be an issue.

---

Live TV Broadcast

YouCaption interfaces with CPC's award winning CaptionMaker® software to control a local or remote hardware closed captions encoder. YouCaption’s advanced speech technology greatly reduces the buffering and lag problems that were inherent to previous speech captioning systems. While a highly skilled stenographer can provide the best results, YouCaption allows you to provide real-time closed captioning in situations where hiring a stenographer is not an option. See the blurb above on Shadow Speaking.

Click here to see how YouCaption works with a closed caption encoder to insert captions to the video for TV broadcast.

---

Special Events

For special events like religious services and sporting events, you can use YouCaption to display the captions on a screen. YouCaption allows you to provide real-time closed captioning in situations where hiring a stenographer is not an option. See see the blurb above on Tip: Shadow Speaking.

---

Post Production

YouCaption outputs a timed transcript of your session. After the event, if you need to broadcast or upload a video recording, you can use this transcript in CPC's CaptionMaker or MacCaption closed captioning software to easily add captions to the video recording. You can also provide a plain text transcript to anyone who missed your event, or use it for indexing and archival.

---

System Requirements (Windows)

Minimum Requirements

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 or later processor (SSE2 instruction set required)
• 1.6GHz Processor Speed, 512KB L2 Cache
• Not Recommended for use on Intel Atom ("netbook") or Celeron processors
• 2GB RAM
• 5GB free Hard Disk space
• Supported Operating Systems:
  • Windows XP SP3 Home/Professional edition (32-bit only)
  • Windows Vista SP1 (32/64-bit)
  • Windows 7 (32/64-bit)
  • Windows Server 2003 or 2008 (32/64-bit)
• Internet access required for software activation & some online features
• YouCaption ships with a special customized version of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Version 11. You must install the version of Dragon that comes with YouCaption. Dragon Version 12 is not supported at this time.

Recommended System:

• Dual core processor (Intel Core series or AMD Athlon X2 series or later)
• 1.8GHz or faster Processor Speed
• 4GB RAM
• 10GB free Hard Disk space
• Windows 7 or Vista
• Notebook computers should be plugged into AC power for best performance