Caption.Ed

Caption dot Ed produces captions during a lecture, meeting or event, and leaves you with a transcript when it finishes. Both halves matter, and people often underestimate the second one.

Live captions get you through the session. The transcript is what lets you go back afterwards, search for the bit you missed and turn an hour of talking into notes you can actually use.

• Sort the audio before the session, not during it. Captioning quality is decided almost entirely by what the microphone hears. A quiet room and a decent input beat any amount of adjusting afterwards.
• Add the vocabulary you know is coming. Course terminology, product names and the names of people speaking are the words it will otherwise guess at.
• Turn speaker identification on for meetings. A transcript that shows who said what is a usable record. One long undivided block is not.
• Check where the sound is coming from. Captioning an online meeting means capturing the audio from the computer, not from the room. Getting that wrong is the most common reason it appears to do nothing.

• The transcript is the accessible artefact. Live captions are a visual output. For a braille display user or anyone reading with speech, the exported transcript is the part that does the work.
• Export into a tool you know. Reading the transcript in Word, with your own navigation and reading commands, beats reading it in the browser.
• Time stamps let you go back to the audio. When the recognition has clearly mangled something, the time stamp takes you to the recording so you can hear what was really said.

Deaf and hard of hearing students and employees, people with auditory processing difficulties, and anyone who cannot take notes and listen at the same time. It is also quietly popular with people who simply want a record of what was agreed.