The quality and speed of your internet connection may affect the speed and quality of your transcription. With a slow or bad/intermittent internet connection the transcription may be delayed or missed words.

The Captional app streams small packets of audio to our transcription server, once the audio is converted to text it’s sent back as even smaller packets of text. If watching Netflix uses about 8 Mb/second of data, Captional uses 0.4 Mb/second. That’s pretty small. Which means it will work on a slower internet connection.

Yes. Imagine you’re having an outdoor wedding and there is no WiFi. Captional will still work using your phone's mobile data. The sender and receivers do not have to share a network, in fact, if you have the Room Code for an event, you can access the captions on the other side of the world.

No, Captional does not use very much data. To send an audio stream to be captioned uses about 360kbps. One hour of transcription uses about 180 MB of data.

On average, with a good internet connection it takes about 0.3 to 1 second for spoken words to be transcribed and displayed on screen.

Yep. For this reason, please do not rely on Captional in emergencies or especially sensitive situations.

Captional uses AI or Artificial Intelligence to generate captions, with no human involvement. Since AI can make mistakes, we think it’s best suited for the small screen.

In the same way that listening to someone speak English with an unfamiliar accent may be difficult for you, the AI transcription accuracy may suffer. However, because of how the AI is trained, in some cases it may actually have a clearer understanding of what’s being said.

Under ideal conditions the AI model is very accurate, but you will notice that the AI transcription will make mistakes that a human would not.

While the AI model does use some contextual clues, words that sound similar such as cold, colt and cult may be interchanged, resulting in a rather unusual sentence. You and I will know the difference, and given the context, will likely understand what was meant.

The AI model Captional uses was trained to understand many different accents and dialects, however, it can be phonetically very literal, so if you say “just” with a Wisconsin accent that sounds like “jest”, Captional may use the word “jest”.

One more thing that real-time captioning in general does not do well, is sentence structure. Most commonly real-time captions will interpret a pause in speaking to indicate the end of a sentence. Speakers frequently use dramatic pauses in the middle of sentences for emphasis. Captional frequently gets this wrong.

In our testing the best way to improve accuracy was to move the microphone closer to the speaker. Making this change increases the volume of the speaker relative to the background noise.

If you’re using Captional in a setting that has a PA (sound system) the best way to get clear audio is to use the sound board as your source. Use a dedicated BUS to isolate the speaker from other unmuted channels. If it’s all Greek to you, ask your sound person, they will know what this means.

If you’re using Captional without a sound system, we recommend using a clip-on wireless microphone or a Bluetooth microphone. We have a few favorite wireless microphones that might work with your mobile phone.

Translation is done through artificial intelligence (AI). Its purpose is to give you the gist of what’s being said in a language that the viewer is more comfortable with. As with any system, if bad information goes in, bad information goes out. Wrong words in the original transcript may create an even more confusing translation. To improve the quality of your translations you first need to make sure your original transcript is as accurate as possible by speaking clearly into a close microphone.

Yes! We offer a 2-week free trial with up to 4 hours of transcription. If you’re interested in trying out Captional click the Get Started link on the home page page or send an email to talk@caption.al.

Captional uses state of the art AI transcription models that run on very sophisticated servers. The servers, data bandwidth, and development cost money to use. Monthly fees also enable us to provide exceptional support.

The Captional program streams the audio input to be transcribed in the cloud. Every quarter second a section of audio data is sent to the transcription server and the transcription server sends back a text packet. The Captional server then forwards that text packet on to any device that’s connected to your stream.

All of this happens in about 250 milliseconds or less. It’s pretty amazing!

Currently Captional costs $50.00 US per month per account, or $550 per year. Organizations that require more than one Room Code will need to create an additional account for each Room Code.

No. We only keep the audio packets long enough for transcription and then they disappear. We also do not store your transcriptions.

On the web version of Captional (on a computer browser) it is possible to select all of the text and copy then paste the text into a document to save for later.

For a more accurate transcript we recommend re-uploading an audio recording of your event for post transcribing. This takes longer, but can be more accurate because the AI can process larger portions of audio with more contextual information.

Currently there is no limit to the number of simultaneous viewers. This will likely change in the future as Captional becomes a more sophisticated product.

No. Captional is a cloud service, so the text stream can be accessed anywhere in the world that there is an internet connection. Please let me know if you’re using Captional at the North Pole; that would be very cool.

Android Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.captional.app

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captional/id1631462532

Absolutely. Captional runs on iOS, Android and on any Mac or PC in your web browser.

In most cases no, you do not need any additional equipment, typically you can use the computers and phones you already own.

No, you do not need to create an account to view captions. Users only need to know the Room Code to access the captions using the mobile app or our our website at http://app.caption.al

Android Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.captional.app

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captional/id1631462532

Your Room Name is like the channel number on your television. For users to access your channel, they will need to enter your Room Name when first launching Captional. Captional will remember the Room Name the next time you launch the app or access it through the web page.

The Room Name that you chose when you created your account can only be changed by an administrator at Captional. Please email phil@caption.al for assistance.

Once your Room Name is changed you will need to logout and log back into your account for Captions to be sent to the new Room Name.

Captional viewers will also need to change the Room Name on their device by tapping on the Name at the top of their screen.

To delete your account please email phil@caption.al. We’ll double check that this is what you want to do, then we’ll make sure our system forgets everything about your account.

Please email phil@caption.al to reset your password.

Great question! To view Captional captions you can use our website, or install the iOS or Android app. Website: http://app.caption.al

Android Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.captional.app

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captional/id1631462532

The first time that you launch Captional it will ask you to input the Room Code for your venue. This is kinda like picking a channel on a TV, this Room Code will be provided to you by the individual or venue.

You only need to do this setup step once, Captional will remember the Room Code

Captional can translate spoken English into the following captioned languages:

Bulgarian

Chinese

Czech

Danish

Dutch

Estonian

Finnish

French

German

Greek

Hungarian

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian (Bokmål)

Polish

Portuguese

Portuguese (Brazilian)

Romanian

Russian

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Turkish

Ukrainian