Years ago, when I was working on ASL (American Sign Language), my teachers relied on separate devices connected to TV sets to provide subtitles – this was limited and, truth be told, not very accurate. These days, nearly every video (and every TV) has captions for the deaf, hard of hearing, or having trouble following the sounds coming from the set.
Unfortunately, the use of captions is not that common for video conferencing, even as we become more dependent on it for work and social gatherings. Zoom, for example, lets you set up closed captioning by going to settings before a meeting, but it doesn’t have its own tool – you’ll either have to use a third-party service or assign someone to type it manually. meeting.
Two video conferencing services recently made available for free – Google Meet and Microsoft Teams – now both offer built-in captioning. Out of curiosity, I tried to see how accurate they both were.
I didn’t use any special equipment – I started a meeting using the 13-inch 2017 MacBook Pro using the system camera and microphone, as I do in most business meetings. I sat close to my usual distance from the screen. Next, I read the first line of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” to see how well it translated into subtitles.
If you don’t remember this well-known piece of writing, here’s how it starts:
A gloomy midnight, as I think, weak and tired,
On many strange and intriguing volumes of forgotten lore—
I nodded, almost dozing off, suddenly there was a click,
Like someone tapping on my room door.
“This is a visitor,” I muttered, “banging on my room door…
Just this and nothing else.”
Note that this is a very informal test. Also, outside noises and minor differences in my readings may have affected the results. It is said to be.
Microsoft Teams
Teams recently added the ability to use captions in their meetings – in fact, the feature was labeled “preview” so it’s probably still being worked on. Turning it on is easy: Once you’ve started your meeting, click the three dots in the menu and select “Turn on live captions”. Subtitles appear above the video at the bottom of the screen.
In the closed caption version of Teams, two lines of text from the bottom appear at the bottom of the video for a few seconds. Each line takes a while as the AI noticeably corrects itself. While this mostly worked, in one case Teams actually had the correct wording at first – “room door” – and then corrected it to “with room or”.
Here are the final results:
It was once a gloomy midnight.
While I was thinking weak and tired.
On many familiar, no-nonsense volume
forgotten lore.
I nodded, almost dozing off, suddenly
there was a click.
Like someone who gently wraps
my room or just me a visitor
he muttered, tapping my chain. or
not just this and more.
Google Meet
Enabling captions in Meet, as in Teams, is easy: just click “Turn on captions” at the bottom of the window. At this point, your video will move up and between that and the submenu there will be a black bank where your subtitles will appear.
In the subtitle box, the speaker is identified by a name and icon. As in Teams, captions move from bottom to top; however, in this case, there is a maximum of five lines appearing at the same time.
While Meet seemed to prefer continued sentences, its accuracy was far beyond Teams, at least in this example. This was not surprising, since Google was playing around with voice recognition and captioning with its various services.
Here are the final results:
Once upon a time when I was gloomy in the middle of the night while I was thinking
weak and tired in the face of so many strange and curious
Forgotten wisdom volume almost shaking my head
suddenly there was a click
someone rapping gently in my room
a visitor at the door. I muttered touching me
the room door is just that and nothing else.
The captioning off feature may not seem like an important feature at first when choosing which service to use for your video meetings. However, take into account that you may have colleagues, friends or relatives for whom captioning is a necessity, not a luxury.