Live TV Captioning: Human or Machine Transcription?

[Gear300]

Are they really caption machines, or really well-trained stenographers? Like in an NFL or FIFA or other live broadcast. I took it that they might have been caption machines with highly advanced grammar compilers, but looking around, I guess they can just as well be very fast typists/keyboard-players.

When somebody asked two years ago which language would dominate the future (because English seems to hold most of the Internet), I thought that ironically NLP and fast-translating machines would preserve pluralism in language, mostly because in a hundred or so years, we would have fast-translating or quick-witted grammar compilers.

 

[anorlunda]

Are they really caption machines, or really well-trained stenographers? Like in an NFL or FIFA or other live broadcast.

I think machines.

One thing I have noticed.

1. For news programs, the captions lag behind the spoken words.
2. For studio programs, the spoken words lag behind the captions.

I use captions on TV almost 100% of the time. But I learned to never use captions when watching Jeopardy because the captions reveal the answer before either I or the contestant have time to answer.

I just got a new Google Pixel 6A phone. It has the feature of showing captions for live phone calls or podcasts. It works for downloaded podcasts even when in airplane mode. Obviously, the captions must be generated locally in the phone's machine. I suspect that I may be able to select the language of the phone's caption machine independent of the language of the speech.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Zoom does this today in real time. Not very well for scientific talks ("Is Jay-Sigh a rapper?"), unfortunately.

 

[f95toli]

It depends. Machines are used in some cases, but TV programs with a decent budget still use humans to transcribe, computers still make to many mistakes and that could cause real problems if what is being transcribed is say a news program or a political speech.
As far as I understand the keyboards used are versions of stenotype keyboards.

Note also that this is not as "exotic" as it might seem, there are lots of cases where transcriptions have to happen live; the most obvious case being in a courtroom, where what is said obviously have to be recorded accurately. There are also services that do live transcriptions of e.g. lectures for people with hearing impairments; a colleague of mine uses one of these services when listening to talks at conferences, the built in transcribe feature in e.g. Teams doesn't work quite well enough.

I don't see why the stenographer would be to "highly trained" just because it is live TV? Sure, mistakes might have more impact on TV, but even if it is just a "local" transcription it still needs to be correct.
I friend of mine used to work for a company that transcribes (live) conference calls between business that are e.g. negotiating contracts; needless to say mistakes can be costly.