Zoom Automated Live Captioning for ASTC Annual Conference

INTRODUCTION

CaptioningStar helped a Massive Zoom Event conducted by ASTC and Live Captioned 74+hours of Live sessions in Zoom successfully.

ASTC connects people with science backgrounds and often engages them with scientific activities.

The ASTC Annual Conference was held in the month of October with the topic below as “This is the annual conference for Science Centers and Museums”. This conference focused on professional development for science museum professionals.

Rachel Diamond ,Chief of Staff from ASTC approached our Sales Team with a huge Live Captioning requirement since they had long concurrent sessions to be held on Zoom platform. They had a Captioning preference for mixed-case or upper case. Rachel was pretty confident that this Long concurrent sessions in Zoom will comprise of 2500 participants on the whole and they needed a great technical support from our end.

If you are hosting a Long concurrent sessions in Zoom with several breakout room sessions and wondering how to improve the multiple Zoom sessions accessibility , then this Case Study will help you to figure out on how CaptioningStar helped the ASTC Annual Conference to achieve their meetings accessibility in spite of the bulk requirements.

CHALLENGES WE EXPERIENCED

Since there was a huge demand for Live Captioners especially during this unprecedented situation , our Scheduling Team’s top priority was to assign a Real-Time Captioner to provide accurate captions for these long concurrent sessions in Zoom.

We also informed our client well  in advance if there’s an issue in assigning a Real-Time Captioner for some of their Zoom sessions ,we can alternatively help them with Zoom Automated captions which will give them  almost the similar accuracy of the human captioners.

Zoom Live  Automatic Captioning utilizes automated speech recognition (ASR) integrated with CaptioningStar and with our spontaneous system , Automatic captions will seamlessly appear at the bottom of the Zoom Screen.

This particular event /conference “This is the annual conference for Science Centers and Museums” lasted for 3 hours per event which goes till 9 hours per day. The Event comprised 2,500 registrants and  however, for each individual session they expect that to be much smaller. There were 10 concurrent sessions held between the allotted period of time and producing Automated captions or Real-time captions by a human captioner was not feasible practically.

Most of the Automated Captions Software that’s available in the market today will not support more than two breakout sessions at the same time.It is a tedious process to Live Caption more than two rooms at the same time.

Also assigning a Real-time Captioner as mentioned before is a strenuous process , but we were able to allocate a Real-time Captioner by recruiting new people in this crisis.

SOLUTIONS WE OFFERED

With our technical expertise ,we have supported all the 10 concurrent sessions /breakout room sessions at the same time for 3 days without any hindrance.A unique solution was provided to the client where we suggested them to create a separate event for each concurrent session.Hence we were able to provide Multiple Automated Captions for their breakout room sessions.

We also employed a Real-time Captioner to monitor the Live Captions and incase of any error caused by the Automated system , the real human captioner will be able to resolve the issue and fix the error within no matter of time.

The quality of the captions produced by Automated Captioning System  is nowhere less when compared with the Real-time captions. Also we assigned an individual Project Manager to monitor the end to end concurrent sessions for a smooth and seamless execution of the conference.

INTERACTIVE TRANSCRIPTS DELIVERED

At the end of this Zoom event , we delivered a text document or a raw transcript file so that the customer can either convert it as a SRT file or a Video embedded with closed captions and  upload it to their favourite platforms like YouTube where they can share their content post event to their participants.

We completed all the 74 hours of sessions successfully and the client was certainly impressed with our quality services and we received positive feedback for empowering their Zoom Meetings with our End to End solution.

Thus we are capable of doing even more 10+ breakout rooms sessions and provide solutions to any complex structure and also delight the customers with our Post Event services in Zoom or any other required platform.