Live Captioning/Transcription

My Bishop has asked me to look in to options for live captioning/transcribing our sacrament meeting for deaf members. I grew up in a deaf magnet ward and know that ASL translation is best but he is looking for an alternative as we don't have people in the ward to can translate. I think he was hoping something like Dragon would work but they don't work well on different voices. I did some searching and found IBM had a product called ViaScribe that some Universities still use but I can't find anywhere to buy it. It seems nobody is willing to use a less than 95% accurate option. I think the ideal option would be an iPad with transcription software and a hearing assist device connected to the Mic input. A laptop with software would also work.

Any ideas or suggestions?

An iPad/Laptop for each deaf member or a videoprojector?
The second choice, I suppose, is not worth for a Sacrament Meeting.
This mean that you need a "voice trasmitter", connected to the mic and several "receivers" to be connected to each deaf member's device.

Yes, projection would be nice but then again if you have enough people that you need a projector, you could probably get a live ASL translator. Remember that the deaf speak ASL, not english so a translator is preferred when possible.

Since all our buildings here have the hearing assisted transmitter built in, we don't need a separate voice transmitter unless someone is walking around. Even then I would probably throw a wireless mic on them.

Anyone have any experience with apps you can load on an iPad or laptop to do such on the fly translation with multiple speakers?

rogerscr wrote:Remember that the deaf speak ASL, not english so a translator is preferred when possible.

I was going to ask - is transcription going to work for them?

Have you tried contacting CHQ to see what might be available? I'm wondering if they have any service that uses something like PVC to connect a translator with a congregation.

Or perhaps they might work to assign some deaf missionaries to your ward.

Every deaf person I have known can read and write the language they live in, ASL is just their first language.

At this point we are working on activation so it would be a bit overboard to assign missionaries etc. If anyone has seen anything available thru SLC I would be interested to hear about it.

We recently had a similar situation. As a ward clerk, I went through the membership records and found a hearing brother in our ward who had served an ASL mission. He had not attended with us for a long time, but the ward council made efforts to ask him to come back and to help us to translate for another deaf brother in our ward.

The Lord truly does provide in mysterious ways.

www.cpcweb.com

www.telestream.net

Look into these.