MONTRÉAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SOVO Technologies announces the availability of English-language closed captioning services that make live broadcasts accessible for the deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. SOVO’s live captioners, using the company’s exclusive technology platform, remotely deliver high quality, regulatory compliant, realtime captions for live TV and internet-based content, whether it be news, political or cultural events, live sports, etc.
Quality captioning is now being enforced throughout North America by regulatory bodies such as the CRTC and the FCC for 100% of the TV programming and for a growing portion of internet-based content, which means broadcasters now more than ever need to find cost- effective ways to deliver fast and accurate captions for live programs.
Today, most of the live captions for English-language broadcasts in North America are produced through computer-assisted stenography. But stenographers are becoming scarce and expensive resources. On one hand, there is significant growth in the amount of content that needs to be made accessible, and on the other it takes a number of years for new stenographers to learn their skills and get enough experience to deliver quality live captions, in particular for fast-paced, unscripted content such as sports or debate/commentary shows. Respeaking technology, where a live captioner repeats what he or she hears from a broadcast into a speech recognition system to produce realtime captions, shows promise from a cost and flexibility perspective, but has yet largely failed to deliver the consistent quality results expected from broadcasters and viewers alike.
Leveraging the company’s own ground-breaking STDirect live captioning platform based on proprietary speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence, SOVO can deliver the quality and consistency in live captions expected from an experienced stenographer, but with a cost structure and operational efficiency typically attributed to respeaking production methods. SOVO can bring onboard new live captioners in a matter of weeks and still deliver the captioning speed and accuracy required even in the most difficult circumstances.
“We are proud to finally deliver to the English-language broadcast market the technical innovations and respeaking operations’ expertise that have made our reputation for over a decade in the French-language market”, said Serge Forest, President of SOVO. “We believe that this latest service offering is a perfect fit for today’s broadcasting business environment where cost savings are sought, but any compromise on captioning quality and viewer acceptance is not an option.”
SOVO completely manages all of the performance aspects of its service from the recruiting, training and regular quality monitoring of the captioners, to the continuous updates of the large shared dictionaries and language models used in production, as well as the constant evolution of the systems and underlying technology. Doing so allows SOVO to offer the utmost quality in realtime captioning using a completely consistent and scalable model.
More details on SOVO’s services can be found at www.sovo-tech.com.
About SOVO
SOVO’s mission is to increase the reach and accessibility of multimedia content using innovative technology. With a team of experts and a proprietary technology for realtime transcription based on speech recognition and artificial intelligence, SOVO offers its quality closed captioning and transcription services to customers in Europe and North America. www.sovo-tech.com.
