While closed-captions in some form have been around for decades, the underlying technologies have gone through a period of rapid evolution in just the last few years. Many applications (including ours) now include automatic caption generation using artificial intelligence to do speech-to-text conversion. Not long ago this wasn’t possible at all. But now, with the advancement of devices being powered by Alexa, Siri, Hey Google, et. al., those advancements are available not only for home entertainment, but also for business applications.
The other day in a client meeting, the new AI captioning feature of Broadcaster was being discussed and the client mentioned that automatic captions were now available in the browser itself. We started poking around and sure enough, there was the option.
There is also a long list of languages that the browser supports.
Adding additional languages won’t translate the content (it won’t take words spoken in English and translate them to another language) but it will build in automatic support if the language selected is being spoken.
The captions generated by the browser will appear in a pop up window that can be moved around anywhere on the desktop. The caption window is not tied to the browser window they are being generated for. The image below shows the captions laid over the top of the browser window they are being generated for but they could easily be moved anywhere so they wouldn’t obstruct the video window.
If you would like the captions translated to a different language, lower in the settings menu there is an option to turn on translation of the captions to a multitude of different languages. This option will send the captions, that are generated in the browser, to Google for translation to the selected languages. The image below shows what the translation from English to Simplified Chinese looks.
Accessibility has taken a huge step forward with this browser feature. It is very impressive and should help many people. It should also help companies as it will make compliance with ADA laws for accessibility easier to achieve, which is why we wanted to pass the information along.