Ultratec, the manufacturer of various types of telecommunications equipment for deaf and hard of hearing people, plans to begin providing live captions for people who have difficulty hearing during personal conversations, for professionals in business meetings, or for students in lectures. It will provide the user with a written transcription of everything the other person in the conversation says. Instant Captioning is expected to provide clarity in interpersonal communications for people with hearing loss, by providing virtually real-time written text to accompany the spoken words. If the user has difficulty hearing what is said, he will be able to read the captions for clarification. Professionals, too, can use the service in meetings to take notes.
Students using the service can benefit from having a printout of the lecture they are attending.
The new Instant Captioning service is designed to work with a variety of devices, such as laptop or notebook computers, cellular phones with alphanumeric display screens or small hand-held instant captioning devices. Access to the captioning service is done via a cellular connection or a standard telephone line. Although this service can be used by anyone, it is expected to be particularly useful to persons who have moderate to severe hearing loss or who are deaf, allowing them to participate in conversations and other voice-based communication in a functionally equivalent way. To get captions, the user simply presses a key on the Instant Captioning device which dials the captioning service center. The operator transcribes everything that the other party says into text, using extremely powerful, customized voice recognition technology.