David Padmore, Director of Red Bee’s Access and Editorial Services, noted that, “In a news scenario, for example, quite a high proportion of words are pre-scripted or repeated from previous half hours so it’s possible to use audio and other metadata to automatically repurpose and transmit text that already exists. This will reduce the delay in delivering subtitles on the screen and increase the accuracy of realtime captioning.”
Speech recognition is increasingly used in live captioning, both overseas and in Australia. The technology is not yet at a point where it can take the audio of a program and automatically convert it to readable captions, so captioners are required to re-speak the dialogue as a program goes to air. As with captions created by stenocaptioners using phonetic keyboards, there is an inevitable delay before the captions appear on screen, which is something that many Deaf and hearing impaired viewers find problematic.
Red Bee Media supplies all the captions for the BBC and its online iPlayer service. Its Australian branch, Red Bee Media Australia, provides captions for SBS and the Seven, Nine and Ten networks.
Red Bee is also a partner in an EU-funded project which is looking at developing automatic speech recognition and realtime translation in multiple languages.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is currently developing criteria it can use when assessing the quality of captioning, including live captioning. This follows the recommendation of the Federal Government’s Media Access Inquiry that the Broadcasting Services Act will be amended to include for the first time a reference to captions being of an “adequate quality”.
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