How to Add Live Captioning to Your Remote Meetings and Streams Easily (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: With the coronavirus situation we're getting a lot of requests from people that want to add captioning to a live stream that they're doing. Maybe it's a remote meeting that you're participating in for work, or you're a teacher setting up remote learning for students, or a church that wants to add live captioning to their stream services. In all cases adding captioning and or translation that's really easy. In this video I'll show you how it's done. I'm going to use Zoom as the live streaming platform, but you can use the same similar steps with whatever platform you're using. First I'll open a browser and start my Zoom meeting. In my case I have two monitors attached to my computer, so in Zoom I'll choose one of these monitors as the one I want to share. Note that I'm picking a monitor versus an individual window or program. Then I'll display whatever slides or video that I want to show others. In this case I'll open up a PowerPoint presentation. Here's a bit of a PowerPoint tip. When I launch PowerPoint I'm going to go to the slideshow tab, select the setup slideshow option, and click the browse by an individual window option. This way I can show more than one application on my monitor. I'll position that window something like this. Next I'm going to start my captioning. To do that I'll open up a Chrome browser tab, go to streamer.center, and I'll log into my streamer account. I'll then select the streamer room I want to use for the session. I'll resize the window, and I think I'll close the side panel like this. When I click on the microphone, now everything that I'm saying is captioned. I think I'll increase the font size like this. There, now I'll click on the PowerPoint slides to bring it to the front, and I'm all set to caption my presentation. That's how most people add captioning. There's another way to do it as well, using streamers overlay tool. Just to start fresh, I'll clear the transcript,

Speaker 2: then I'll launch the overlay tool. There, now I can superimpose the captioning on top of my PowerPoint

Speaker 1: slides. Note that the tool shows a picture of the person that is speaking, in this case me. If there are multiple presenters in your meeting, each time a new person starts speaking, this picture is updated. There are a lot of settings in the overlay window. I can choose the font that I want to use, the size, the color, and the color of the background, along with the transparency setting. Here I can choose the line spacing, and the size of the avatar picture that's displayed. There's also this caption buffer feature. Streamer dynamically updates the transcript using context surrounding the words. It does this in both directions, using previously spoken words to determine each new word, and when new words are selected, it looks back in time and updates those previous words as well. This bidirectional use of context is one of the reasons streamer is so accurate. The downside is that as these words are updated, it causes the transcript to jump a bit. To smooth that out, you can add a buffer to the captioning. A large buffer slightly delays the appearance of the words, but it smooths out all of those updates. I tend to use the medium or short buffer. Well, that's it for this video. Thanks for watching, and as always, if you have any questions, just let us know and we'll be glad to help.