Cloudy captions
Online captions make videos accessible to people with hearing or language disabilities, and make content indexing and searching possible for everyone. There are more than a few online captioning tools. But SpeakerText is a bit different. It uses speech recognition and human transcribers to provide text at $2 a minute plus your volume-based monthly fee, with a turnaround of 48 hours. It stores the synchronized transcript in the cloud, and loads a player when people visit the video on your site, with additional features like search and quote. A good price for an innovative service that may help captions go even more mainstream.
SpeakerText Builds the Missing Text Layer for Online Video [Invites]
Tune in, turn on
Auto-Tune is software that can make bad singers sound competent, or game show hosts sound stoned. Wonder if the technology could also be used to modify the voices of people with dysarthric speech so that speech recognition applications would recognize them better?
Gizmodo: What Is Last Week’s “Alex Meets Auto-Tune” Jeopardy Category?
PhoneTag Live, you’re it!
Ditech Networks (not the lenders) has had a voice mail transcription service for a while. Now they’re offering live transcription for conference calls. This is a mainstream version of the real-time captioning service that’s been available for deaf and hard of hearing participants through specialty service providers. Going mainstream often has payoffs in quality, variety, and price; what will the future of live transcription bring? Right now it’s on the phone; will we see live follow-me transcription bringing captioning into every environment?
PhoneTag Live Transcription for Conference Calls available now from Ditech Networks | Business Wire
Talk radius
Hmmm…a headset that bypasses touch screen access problems by enabling both audio output and speech input? Sounds like a product designed for blind (and some learning/cognitively disabled) folks, but it’s actually a mainstream product from Bluetrek that was shown at CES last week.
Ubergizmo: Bluetrek Dial 2DO Bluetooth headset does text to voice to text
Thus voicemailed Zarathustra
GotVoice is the forthcoming result of a collaboration between Microsoft and a company called Spoken to create a better strategy for doing audio-to-text transcription of voicemails. Unlike some current systems that rely heavily on human transcription, GotVoice will use a hybrid of software transcription and human “troubleshooting.” Fingers crossed that this will lower the price of the service and make it more readily available to the deaf and learning-disabled folks who are likely to find it particularly beneficial.
Gadgetell: Spoken teams with Microsoft to offer transcribed text voicemail service
The turn of the SQ?
We wrote several days ago about the Dream Screen, a limited Internet access device that might find its niche in a senior/accessibility arena. A portable device with even more potential is the Lighthouse SQ7, which provides a web browser, easy access to Facebook and Twitter–AND voice recognition capability. As always, we’re skeptical about the ability of the last-named feature to accommodate all users, but even without that the SQ7 could find an audience among those who need or value simplicity in their web access strategies.
Coffee talk
Hammacher Schlemmer is coming out with a coffee maker that politely asks, “Would you like to set the clock or set the coffee brewing time?”, and then responds to your verbal commands. Obvious hands-free implications, and no indication in the description that voice training is necessary–although that makes us wonder how it does with dysarthric speech or accents. In other words, is it like buttah, or would it leave us verklempt?