Syncwords was thrilled to be a sponsor for the Non-Obvious Diversity Summit held in Jan 2021, where 200+ speakers participated over 50 sessions. https://www.nonobviousdiversity.com/
The summit brought together diverse perspectives involving speakers from multiple points of view.
Check out a special interview with summit host Rohit Bhargava and Syncwords VP Giovanni Galvez where they talk about everything about captions and why they matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R4gsnYZ5l8&list=PLPYmVTmVub5I0Q03SrWwtTptn_PetTpBT&index=54
Transcript
Welcome to a very special episode of the Non-Obvious Insights Show as part of the Beyond
Diversity Summit. And we are going to talk about a very important and under-appreciated
topic right now, which is captioning. And I'm joined by my new friend, Giovanni Galvez, Gio,
as he's known to his friends, and now we are friends, to talk about your platform SyncWords
and your amazing background in doing this. Now, you come from broadcast television
background and you've been doing closed captioning for a long time. And now you've got a
company, SyncWords, that allows us to do captioning and live automated captioning for
virtual events as well. And you're working on lots of different things with virtual reality. And
we we just had so many places to go. And by the way, we are currently using SyncWords as
the captioning provider for the entire Non-Obvious Beyond Diversity Summit. So we are
customers using the platform. And I'm so happy to be talking to you about this right now, Gio.
Thank you for joining me.
Yeah. Thank you so much, Rohit. I'm very excited to be here.
Yeah. And and I want to talk a little bit, first of all, about the necessity for captioning. I think
that a lot of times we sort of think about it as an afterthought or we we know that we probably
should. It's sort of like it’s it's for some people in that brushing your teeth category, like we
know we should do it, but we don't actually always do it the way we should. So talk a little bit
about why captioning is important in the first place.
Yeah, so there's two ways to really look at it. The first way is, um, you know, do you want to
be as inclusive and to provide accessibility to your to your audience? Right. When they're
joining like a virtual event, for example, right now, that's really important. Um, there's forty-
eight million people in the United States who suffer from hearing loss, who are deaf and hard
of hearing. So that's a big demographic. You know, looking at it worldwide, the number is
even bigger. So if by having accessibility, you're actually allowing people to join your event
and and being able to appreciate it as much as everyone else. Um, of course, you know, there's
budgets and there's things to keep in mind. But nowadays, you know, it becomes very
economic to have captioning and there's technology that allows you to do it. The other—Oh,
go ahead.
--Sorry. I'm sorry. No, I didn't mean to cut you off.
The other aspect of it is, of course, there's there's people like that have to do it
because it's required by law. You know, there's broadcasters on T V. They have to do it,
otherwise they get fined. This is true in not only in in the United States, but Canada, Mexico
and other countries, even in P-- Asian countries. Now they're adding this law. From the virtual
space, we see universities, government agencies. They also have a mandate to be accessible.
Right. And they want to avoid, you know, fines, litigation or or jeopardizing any other public
funding. So they have to be accessible. And it's not just about, you know, putting ramps in
their in their infrastructure or or having websites that are accessible, but adding closed
captioning specially to live events and prerecorded videos. So there's legislation that drives it,
you know. So you can't forget or you can't like, you know, not do it.
Yeah.
And then there's, of course, the the aspect of of of trying to make something
that appeals to your audience that that they can use.
And and there's really sort of two directions to go when it comes to captioning. And we face
this choice as event organizers ourselves. There's the human version, which is someone's
actually doing it, and then there's the automated version, which is using artificial intelligence
and you actually offer both of those services. So how do how does one contrast those two?
When is it optimal to use one versus the other? Give us a little bit of a a cheat sheet, so to
speak, on on how to decide what's the best option for captioning.
Yeah, I I guess what drives
the automatic speech stuff
is the cost.
Right.
It's it’s certainly a lot cheaper
than having a human captioner.
Um, really, it's always
going to be more optimal
to have a human captioner.
And the reason is because,
you know, not everyone has these fancy
headphones or like a nice
Yeti microphone
in front of them that gives a good audio, right.
It could be a mixed bag.
And so when that happens,
if the audio is bad
or, you know,
the sound is too low
or there's
a lot of other factors,
the automatic speech
is not going to do a good job.
Not only that, punctuation,
things like that
are problematic with automatic speech.
It's becoming better,
but it's not quite up to par
with the human captioner.
And I think we're still
a ways from that.
Having said that, there's also
the other dimension, which is
there's machine translation
of the live captions.
So you have the the English captions
that are done and then people want to,
you know, in real-time translate
that to French, Spanish,
Chinese, Japanese, Italian.
And when the English
is not right, um, meaning if there's
too many errors,
then the translation
is just not usable at all.
So in that case, you always
should use a human captioner
if you're going to do
the real-time translation
and the ASR is just not
an option in that case.
Yeah, and and you mentioned
that that cost is sometimes
one of the drivers. Time,
I'm sure, is one of the one of the drivers
as well to be able to do this.
But it makes it makes a huge
difference because, I mean,
I think sometimes we see
these these innovations
or these tools
and technologies and we think,
well, it was created for people
who have disabilities.
And I don't know
that my audience actually
has a disability
or needs this.
But at the same time,
what you realize is, look,
there's a lot of situations
where people are watching video
with the sound off
where they sometimes
don't understand
what someone's saying as easily.
Maybe it's an accent,
maybe it's their--
they don't have a good
microphone, like you said.
So there are many situations
where having, kind of, captioning
is is actually it's not just
for the disabled audience.
It's for for all of us
who sometimes need
those captions
in certain situations.
And so it's just a good thing
to do across the board.
That's absolutely true.
And actually,
there have been studies.
That could be our opinion
or some opinions differ.
But there's actual
scientific studies that show
that when captions are on
when you're watching a lecture
or a presentation,
that you actually
your vocabulary grows,
specially children.
You actually can pay
more attention
rather than zone off
and get distracted by,
you know, say, you know, your phone
beeping and, you know, feeds and stuff.
So captioning has a a kind of like a way
to help people engage better,
even if they're not deaf
and hard of hearing,
and especially for children
even having captions on
when they're watching
their favorite show,
their vocabulary
can increase by three-fold.
And there’s, uh, facts
and scientific studies that backed
by the National Captioning Institute
in the in United States.
Yeah, I I love that,
and I I know that you have many
different ways
that people can use
your service, you also have
a lot of organizations
who are already using it,
and it's very successful.
And we are absolutely
grateful to you
for helping to support
this summit,
for being a part of it,
for providing the software
and the technology
and and the support for us
to be able to caption
more than fifty hours of content
that we have released
as part of this summit
and making it as accessible
as possible to a huge, wide,
diverse audience.
So if people want
to learn more about
SyncWords, if they want
to check out the platform
and learn how to get their own
captioning or auto trans-- machine
translations or any of the other
services that you provide,
how can they find out
about the services
and and see what you can do
for them?
Yeah, absolutely.
They can go to our website
SyncWords dot com.
Um, we're always available to, uh--
We work twenty-four seven,
so believe it or not,
we'll reach out to you
very quickly.
You know, events happen all day,
every day, all night.
And so reach out to us.
And even if, you know,
you just want to learn
more about the technology.
We also help educate companies
and and organizations
to understand more.
Love that. Well, thank you
so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
And and I will say, as somebody
who is just working with
SyncWords for the first time,
the team has been
super responsive.
We have had
an amazing experience
of working with your team.
So I want to say
thank you for that.
Thank you
for supporting the event.
And if you're watching this
and you do need to get
captioning done,
definitely check out
SyncWords, our partner
for the Non-Obvious
Beyond Diversity Summit.
It's an awesome platform,
highly recommended.
Thanks for watching,
everybody.
I hope you enjoyed
this short review
of what it takes
to caption the videos
and I hope you enjoy
the rest of the Non-Obvious
Beyond Diversity
Summit as well.
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