Live Captioning a Podcast, Lecture, etc.

Captioning has been demonstrated to be a powerful way to increase attention, retention, and comprehension of spoken content - for everyone (Gernsbacher, 2015). It's also part of any plan to address WCAG, ADA, or 504 guidelines.

While more and more frequently we are seeing pre-recorded media captioned, live captions are far more rare due to the expense and other pragmatic barriers of hiring live transcribers, especially in absence of a person who has an accommodation requirement to that effect. But, what if I told you... <sigh> I can't start a sentence that way without invoking Morpheus. I'll let him say it.

Below, I will show you how you can hack together two systems (Google Slides & Zoom) to generate automatic speech recognition captions for a live podcast, lecture, etc. But you have to make a choice. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Sorry, I get carried away when I start thinking about the Matrix. Hazard of growing up in the 90s.

Here's the scoop!