Summary
Why you should choose a captioning company that specializes in tech instead of AI.
Why you should choose a captioning company that specializes in tech.
If you have ever been to a tech conference that we have captioned, you have probably wondered, “How the heck are we getting all your jargon?!”
That’s usually the second thought after, “Wow. This AI captioning is really great.” This is the most common reaction when people start to see our captioning.
But astute tech audiences eventually come to the realization that this is not AI-generated captioning – this must be done by humans. We are approached at every conference by a few brave souls who are willing to come talk to us about it.
Please do approach us during a break! We love to talk about what we do!
They tell us that their thought process went something like this:
a) They thought it was outstandingly accurate AI (artificial intelligence) or ASR (automated speech recognition) captioning at first, and they are eager to find out what captioning tool is being used. Then:
b) They noticed that every now and then, we’d make a correction of a mistake that seemingly could only be done manually and using human powers of reasoning and cognition. Then:
c) They thought about how the AI captioning or transcription works on their phones and their dictation software and automatic captioning or ASR on their video calls and all the tools they know about, and they thought, “Nah. This can’t be AI.” But they have a hard time wrapping their brains around what other method it could be. Because surely this wouldn’t be done by… humans…. Would it?
Then – and this is the best, most delicious one to realtime captioners:
d) They think, “Hey, wait a minute!! I work on this AI stuff and I know it’s not this good, so what is going on here?”
Well, here’s what is going on here:
First of all, we are extremely good at what we do. And second, we specialize in captioning tech.
We are fully immersed in tech conferences and tech company meetings day in and day out – and nights and weekends too, sometimes.
So whether your language is Go, Rust, Ruby on Rails, Python, Elm, Clojure, Javascript, Kotlin, PHP, Swift, CSS, Perl, SQL, C++ – you get the idea – we’ve got your jargon down.
Whether it’s your internal dog puns or bird puns or your mascots like Wapuu or Gopher, we have learned already – or we do our very best to keep abreast of – the latest insider lingo, as well. We know about your dogfooding and your devops and your mySQL. And why Automattic has two t’s.
We know your View from your Vue. We know your SaaS from your Sass – all delivered with a little of our extra sass.
We know your snake case from your camel case from your Pascal case from your kebab case.
We know your acronyms and your shorthand and your abbreviations. Your CSS, your CMS, your CDNs, APIs, DNSs, and GUIs, and your divs.
I should add the caveat: Most of the time we know your acronyms. Those are sometimes tough to understand, especially when we are captioning remotely and have not been given the slides ahead of time, or if we can’t view them in realtime to give us clues and cues about what you are talking about.
We have a hard time getting people to give us the prep materials we need. Let me take this opportunity to put in my perennial, evergreen request to PLEASE GIVE US YOUR SLIDES AND SPEAKER NOTES AHEAD OF TIME (yes, I’m shouting!) so we can prepare!
It is so great when we get them easily, but when we don’t, which is unfortunately pretty much the norm, this is how we prepare for your event, and this is again why you should choose a captioning company that specializes in tech:
- If you have a well built conference website, we visit the website. We can get lots of valuable material from there, such as the names of all the sponsors for your event.
- Also on the website, we can find the schedule, which has the titles and short descriptions of the talks. When we learn the general topic, we can do some Googling to find more information on that topic that can be helpful.
- We can click on the speaker bio links, and get lots of helpful information. This is particularly helpful because speakers are often introduced, or introduce themselves, at a very rapid clip. It would be better for us if intros were not sped through, but it is what it is, so we are as prepared as we can be.
Here’s the tricky part, and this is where we really wish you’d give us more prep materials:
If, in your talk about tech, you start using Sanskrit words for yoga poses or obscure historical references, or talk about telenovelas, or use art references, or obscure musical analogies, or start rapping or speaking in Yiddish or Klingon (yes, I’ve had all of these happen!), all bets are off, and we’d really appreciate a heads up on that kind of stuff ahead of time.
