SyncWords Now Integrated with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams users rejoice! Microsoft has recently enabled third-party captioning for Teams, its live collaboration product. Microsoft Teams, the collaborative workspace inside the Microsoft 365/ Office 365 framework, acts as a hub for workplace dialogue and collaboration, enabling teamwork through video chats and document sharing. The product has been designed to aid worker productivity in an online environment with a suite of tools built for collaboration.
The number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams has almost doubled in the past year, increasing from 75 million users in April 2020 to 145 million as of the second quarter of 2021. SyncWords is now fully integrated with MS teams, supporting the product with live captioning solutions, making Teams collaborations easier, accessible, and inclusive. Since its launch in 2017, MS Teams has used automatic captioning. But this switch to third-party captioning offers its users enhanced collaborations. With SyncWords’ captioning technologies driven by human captioners, the first, big advantage is the accuracy that MS Teams can now enjoy every time they collaborate online.
Automatic Captioning v/s Human Captioning
You’ve already read about Automatic Captioning, also known as Audio Speech Recognition (ASR), and its benefits when provided by SyncWords. ASR is a great, but not perfect, technology, though. It still depends on many factors including audio quality, speaker accents, overlapping speech, etc. Another instance of producing text from speech that, unfortunately, has room for error is repetition and redundancies. Speech fillers that have evolved alongside language culture and as part of the human thought process are not fully comprehended by machines.
ASR also faces challenges in cases where speakers correct themselves mid-sentence. These are gaps that a human captioner or transcriber will recognize and use judgment in rendering the text in a comprehensible format that mirrors the speaker’s intentions. Speech recognition technology still has some distance to go in discerning these patterns of speech and understanding context.
SyncWords stands out with its human captioning assets that help deliver captions that are 99% accurate.
Added Benefit of Live Translations and 24/7 Tech Support
This increased accuracy in captions also helps with live translations to a host of languages in SyncWords’ translation library. SyncWords offers live translations to over 100 languages, thus empowering native speakers worldwide. Furthermore, SyncWords offers live translations with English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese as source languages.
Complementary, SyncWords’ technical support team also helps with live event coordination and monitoring. They coordinate with the human captioners, ensuring that they are equipped with all details and agendas of the event beforehand. These may include special instructions and materials from event hosts such as PowerPoints, and acronyms which can help elevate the accuracy of captioning. Like with any stage event, our support team logs in well in advance to test out key tech aspects of the event. Providing accurate captions in the source language (language for the main event) is crucial as any AI & ML-driven translations are derived from the source language. The accuracy of the source captions is then reflected in the translations in the language of your choice.
SyncWords is one of the leading service providers to provide real-time, live, 24/7 technical support. Our multilingual tech team has decades of experience in customer support, with thorough knowledge of the various technologies at play in the industry. These include but are not limited to captioning, subtitling, broadcast, cinema, and OTT.
Wrapping up
In the last two years, there has been a distinct shift in how online event platforms and collaboration tools consume captions for more immersive content experiences. Now that these platforms have understood the advantages that caption accuracy and live translations offer their users, automatic captioning has had to make way for third-party captioning service providers, offering the entire gamut of captioning solutions. And SyncWords is one of the world leaders in captioning technologies, with its innovation mindset and core values of accessibility and inclusivity. So, we say: welcome aboard to a truly immersive, inclusive experience via the power of captions.
