[Athen] Caption Mic

[Jayme Johnson]

Hello Stacy,

I met with the Caption Mic salesman in March and got a demo of the system.
Basically you're paying for a laptop that has been optimized for speech
recognition, IBM ViaVoice, an Insertacap Caption encoder, a program to
coordinate the recognized speech with time code, and a little program that
converts your speech recognition file to different formats: .rt, .smi, .txt
(QuickTime), .scc, and .umf (Ultech Media File). 

At first glance it looks like any other speech recognition system you've
seen, but it does add in some functionality of captioning systems in that it
adds timestamps to the text, and it will output files ready to be used for
captioning your media.

It appeared to me that the weakest link in the system is finding someone who
can listen to someone talking while repeating that speech into the Caption
Mic system. While adding time stamps to the transcript during the
recognition process is a time saver (no pun intended), the piece of software
that creates the different file types was what I found most appealing.
Unfortunately, the components are not available individually- they must be
purchased as a complete system which costs around $7,000.00.

I think that Caption Mic might be a good solution for some institutions just
getting started with creating captioned media- provided they have an
individual who can repeat the speech and get good recognition results.
However, if your institution already has some captioning software and a copy
of Dragon Naturally Speaking, you're most of the way to having your own
system. I guess the value of the Caption Mic system depends on what you need
and how much your willing to pay for the convenience of having timestamps
and several caption file formats created automatically.

I hope this helps!

Jayme Johnson
Assistive Computer Technology Instructor
High Tech Center Training Unit
De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
408-996-6045
www.htctu.net

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On
Behalf Of Stacy L. Smith
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 9:29 AM
To: athen at athenpro.org
Subject: [Athen] Caption Mic

All -

A co-worker asked me to check into Caption Mic (www.captionmic.com). 
Anyone know anything about this?

Thanks,
Stacy

Stacy Smith
Adaptive Technology Specialist, Disability Support Services
532-6441
stacylee at ksu.edu

~~~~~~~~~~~~

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of
Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to
train.

--Morehei Ueshiba

_______________________________________________
Athen mailing list
Athen at athenpro.org
http://athenpro.org/mailman/listinfo/athen_athenpro.org