What Closed Captions are & What Closed Captions can do

Closed captions are often overlooked, but do you know there are many benefits to embed them into your video?

Benefits of closed captions

First, closed captioning allows your content to be enjoyed by people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Second, not everyone can understand the audio of a video. Did you know that 80% of social media users watch videos on mute, and about 69% of people watch videos in public places without sound? Therefore, closed captioning is essential if you want to truly maximize your audience.

Finally, closed captions help boost your SEO efforts and get your content in front of the right people.

With all of these wonderful benefits, you may want to consider trying it out for yourself. But what if you don't have the skills, time or budget to create high-quality closed captions?

Machine-generated closed captioning, or automatic closed captioning (ACC), may be the answer.

What are closed captions

Closed captions (CC) appears as text on your screen, representing speech and sound in video and live streams. Unlike captions, CCs include additional elements such as background noise, music, speaker distinctions and descriptions. In addition, there are those all-important non-dialogue audio cues, such as "sighs" or "laughter".

High-quality closed captions can do much more than provide text on your screen. They can help you rank higher in search engines, improve engagement, and enhance the overall audience experience.

What are machine-generated closed captions?

Machine-generated closed captioning or automatic captioning is created using non-human methods. As a standard, the software consists of three components. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, Machine Learning (ML) technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) all contribute to providing real-time automatic speech-to-text captioning for videos.

The ASR component is critical. It instantly recognizes the words spoken and translates them into an on-screen script. This technology can work in two ways; offline or real-time. Offline ASR is great for movies, TV or pre-recorded media.

Real-time ASR allows users to create subtitles in real time. This makes it ideal for any content that is being broadcast live, such as television, presentations, conferences, video calls or other live content.

While automatic speech recognition technology is constantly improving, the accuracy of machine-generated closed captions can vary. Things like microphone quality, speaker intelligibility, speaker accents, dialects, background noise, homonyms and terminology can all affect the outcome of the text.

Where machine-generatedcaptions can be used

If you've ever listened to a video on YouTube, watched someone's Instagram Stories, or had a meeting with your boss via Zoom, chances are you've encountered machine-generated closed captioning.

For many platforms and businesses, their efforts to improve their real-time, live captioning technology are incredible. And it's only going to get better. For example, Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft now all offer automatic captioning on live video calls.

Then there's anything live on TV. From live sporting events to morning news shows, they all utilize machine-generated closed captioning.