Voice recognition captioning?

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Dave Krall CFII

Final Approach
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Dave Krall CFII SEL SES, Cmcl HELI
Sometimes the captions' letters on the TV are only about 25% of those in the actual dialog. They are correct but, run together and not all there. Is this because of insufficient voice recognition technology, a bad typist, or something else? It is program/movie specific and only occasionally, while other channels are fine.

Also, I started using it to see occasional barely audible dialog of actors that were whispering, and found that the captioners/typists don't hear that dialog or type it either.
 
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It varries a lot. When I worked in TV news, most of our shows (especially the evenings and mornings when most everything is pre-scripted) ran the closed captioning off the teleprompter. Everything else (especially shows with a lot of live reports or live, untranscripted interviews) was live captioned. There was actually someone typing along with the show. It tended to lag a LOT, and the accuracy was...suspect.

Most pretaped shows are transcripted for CCing, but not always. Most live shows are live captioned. I'd imagine that's what you were seeing.
 
Teller1900 said:
It varries a lot. When I worked in TV news, most of our shows (especially the evenings and mornings when most everything is pre-scripted) ran the closed captioning off the teleprompter. Everything else (especially shows with a lot of live reports or live, untranscripted interviews) was live captioned. There was actually someone typing along with the show. It tended to lag a LOT, and the accuracy was...suspect.

Most pretaped shows are transcripted for CCing, but not always. Most live shows are live captioned. I'd imagine that's what you were seeing.
Click to expand...

The latest was a movie from 2004. Without hearing the actors, the captions were totally useless, no way to tell anything being said by the captions. But you could see key 2-3 letter sequences of words or phrases.

Hard to Imagine someone being paid for it.
 
I suspect close caption editing is neither an exciting or high paying career, so you probably don't get the best talent out there.
 
When I did CC work for WTIC in CT the program we used was voice recognition done by live speakers. So we would listen to the news and repeat back often an edited version due to speed/strange names, etc. - This was a couple years ago, as of then the strickly voice recognition software wasn't really up to par yet.

As to the pay, it wasn't bad ~15.00/hr but wasn't great.
 
The vast majority of closed captioning is very accurate and with minimal errors, sometimes virtually perfect. That's why how these grossly defective exceptions get onto the screen intrigues me....
 
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