Introduction To Web Captioner
What is Web Captioner? How can it help me? All this and more in this post entitled Introduction To Web Captioner!
Backstory
According to the creator of Web Captioner “In early 2017, a deaf person started attending weekly services at my church in northern Illinois in the United States. We had to figure out a way to make services more accessible to him. The church preferred to not hire an interpreter or pay for expensive remote captioning.
The church first looked at some commercially available speech-to-text solutions, but they provided mixed results: performance was poor, the software had to be retrained often, and they just didn’t seem like they were built to be a reliable live speech-to-text solution that displayed caption output attractively by default.
When I discovered that Google Chrome has some impressively accurate built-in speech-to-text capabilities, I created a quick proof of concept to see if this could be a solution. I shared that proof-of-concept with a Facebook group dedicated to church media and production topics and it received lots of positive attention — I knew I was onto something here.
I turned my proof-of-concept into a packaged product and gave it the name Web Captioner. And today, churches around the world join my local church in using it to caption their services. In addition to churches, though, Web Captioner almost immediately captured the interest of the live streaming community as well. In response to requests from live streamers, I continue to refine Web Captioner to make it integrate well with popular video production software.”
What Can It Do For Me?
Web Captioner’s original use was to allow the deaf to read sermons in real time. It has since evolved to a full speech to text captioning system with support for broadcast systems, Chromecast, and more! I’m sure you’re wondering how much this will cost, right? That’s what I thought when I first heard of Web Captioner too but I soon found out it was 100% free! Yeah, that’s right you’re not seeing things… It doesn’t have a “free plan,” it isn’t a free trial, it’s completely and totally free! All they ask is that if you enjoy and use Web Captioner to consider making a donation which you can do here.
Setup
For such a powerful tool it’s surprisingly plug-and-play. To start just go to the Start Captioning Page and click Start Captioning. It’s that easy. Web Captioner will ask for permission to use your microphone and automatically start transcribing!
Pro Tip: We suggest using a direct line from the sound mixer into an audio interface on your computer in order to get a good clean singal and be able to control the volume.
Of course, there are many advanced settings and options to customize the look and feel. Web Captioner offer numerous settings such as options to change the appearance of the captions, the option to censor profane words (enabled by default), ability to generate captions from a huge list of languages, ability to replace specific words, ability to integrate with the professional streaming software vMix, ability to send captions to any Chromecast enabled device, and more!
Displaying The Captions
You might be saying, “Well that’s great Mackenly but how can I use this in my church?” I’m glad you asked! There are many ways to view captions such as via Chromecast, running a physical screen in your church’s sanctuary, and more! If you come up with a super great idea I’d love to know about how you were able to do it! Let me know in the comments!
Conclusion
Well, that about sums it up for now. I hope this article helps you utilize this great resource! You can read more of our articles about Web Captioner here.