Glossary → Captions & subtitles
Captions & subtitles

Live captioning

Live captioning produces captions in real time for broadcasts, streams, meetings and events, via streaming speech recognition or trained human captioners.

Human methods include stenography and respeaking; automatic live captions run streaming ASR with a couple of seconds of latency and slightly lower accuracy than offline processing.

A common professional pattern is live captions during the event, replaced by corrected batch captions in the recording.

Related terms

Streaming speech recognitionStreaming speech recognition transcribes audio as it arrives, emitting words within moments of them being spok… RespeakingRespeaking is a live-captioning method where a trained captioner listens to the broadcast and re-dictates it —… Closed captionsClosed captions are timed text that can be turned on or off by the viewer, written for deaf and hard-of-hearin…

Frequently asked

What is Live captioning?

Live captioning produces captions in real time for broadcasts, streams, meetings and events, via streaming speech recognition or trained human captioners.

Why does Live captioning matter?

Human methods include stenography and respeaking; automatic live captions run streaming ASR with a couple of seconds of latency and slightly lower accuracy than offline processing.

What terms are related to Live captioning?

Closely related concepts: Streaming speech recognition, Respeaking, Closed captions — each has its own entry in this glossary.

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