Live Captioning for Meetings & Events
Real-time captions and translations for city council meetings, public hearings, town halls, and community events—making every live gathering accessible to all residents.
From Speech to Accessible Content
MediaScribe combines on-premise reliability with cloud-powered intelligence. Here's how your meeting audio becomes accessible captions, translations, and searchable archives.
Real-Time Automatic Captioning
MediaScribe integrates with enterprise-grade automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines to convert spoken audio into text captions instantaneously. The system processes audio streams in real-time, delivering captions with minimal latency to in-room displays, mobile devices, and broadcast outputs simultaneously.
The ASR engine supports over 72 languages natively, with configurable options for profanity masking and disfluency removal (eliminating "um," "uh," and false starts) to produce clean, professional captions suitable for official government proceedings.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires state and local governments to provide effective communication for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Real-time captioning ensures that live public meetings are immediately accessible, meeting Title II requirements for program accessibility. Automatic captioning eliminates the need to schedule human captioners, ensuring every meeting—including emergency sessions—can be made accessible without advance planning.
I'd like to call this meeting to order. We have a full agenda tonight.
Roll call. Council Member Adams?
"The motion to approve the budget is now open for discussion."
"La moción para aprobar el presupuesto está abierta..."
"Đề nghị phê duyệt ngân sách hiện đang..."
"批准预算的动议现已开放讨论..."
"اقتراح الموافقة على الميزانية..."
Multi-Language Translation
MediaScribe leverages advanced neural machine translation to convert English captions into dozens of additional languages in real-time. Administrators can configure which translation languages are available for each meeting preset, and viewers can select their preferred language when accessing captions via mobile devices or the public web interface.
Translation happens simultaneously with transcription—as English captions are generated, they're immediately translated and distributed to all configured language channels. This enables non-English speaking community members to follow proceedings in their native language without delay.
While the ADA focuses on disability access, Executive Order 13166 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act require federally-assisted programs to provide meaningful access to Limited English Proficient (LEP) individuals. Automated translation helps government organizations serve multilingual communities efficiently, demonstrating good-faith efforts to provide language access without the prohibitive cost of hiring interpreters for every language represented in the community.
Display & Distribution
Captions reach your audience wherever they are—in the room, at home, or on their phone.
In-Room Caption Displays
Dedicated caption displays for large-format TVs and projectors in council chambers, hearing rooms, and public meeting spaces. Features customizable branding with organization logos, custom colors, and professional typography.
Mobile Public Access
QR codes let attendees instantly access live captions on their personal devices. Choose from available languages, follow at your own pace, with optional synchronized audio. Works in any browser—no app required.
Broadcast Integration
Integrates directly with broadcast infrastructure including Cablecast automation. CEA-608 closed caption encoding, HLS streaming with embedded captions, and RTMP streaming with caption data.
Recording & Asset Management
MediaScribe provides complete recording and asset management capabilities with one-click recording start/stop, configurable naming templates, and support for recordings up to 12 hours.
One-click start/stop, automatic thumbnails, progress tracking through processing states
Grid and table views, upload external files, search and filter, bulk operations
Automatic transcription, multi-format caption generation, translation processing
Recording meetings with accurate captions creates an accessible archive that allows individuals to review proceedings after the fact. This is essential for those who couldn't attend live sessions and ensures equal access to government records.
The motion to approve the Riverside Park renovation...
Council Member Smith, you have the floor.
Thank you, Mayor Johnson. I'd like to discuss...
Caption Editing & Quality Control
While automatic captions provide excellent accuracy, MediaScribe includes comprehensive editing tools for quality assurance: synchronized video playback, click-to-edit any segment, speaker label assignment, and keyboard shortcuts for efficient editing.
- Profanity masking (automatic or manual)
- Disfluency removal (ums, uhs, false starts)
- Proper noun and terminology correction
- Speaker change formatting options
- Audio preview to verify accuracy
The ADA requires "effective communication," which means captions must be accurate enough to convey the actual content of proceedings. Editing tools ensure that automated captions can be corrected for technical terms, proper nouns, and any recognition errors. This is especially important for official government records where accuracy has legal significance.
Precision That Earns Trust
Speaker identification and custom vocabularies ensure your captions are accurate, professional, and genuinely useful.
Speaker Identification
Sophisticated speaker identification (diarization) automatically detects speaker changes, uses voice fingerprinting to identify recurring speakers, and maintains consistent labeling throughout recordings.
- Create profiles for regular meeting participants
- Train the system to recognize specific voices
- Associate speakers with meeting presets
- Label with names, titles, or roles
Why it matters: Speaker identification tells caption readers who is speaking—information that hearing individuals receive automatically from voice recognition and visual cues.
Custom Vocabulary
Every community has unique vocabulary—street names, local officials, department names, and technical terms. MediaScribe's custom vocabulary system ensures accurate recognition of these terms.
- Local street, park, and building names
- Names of officials and frequent speakers
- Department and agency names
- Zoning codes, legal terms, acronyms
Why it matters: Generic speech recognition often mangles proper nouns and local terminology. Custom vocabularies ensure captions correctly represent the specific terms used in your proceedings.
Multiple Output Formats
MediaScribe produces captions in all major formats required for different distribution channels, automatically generated from the master transcript.
Different distribution channels have specific technical requirements. Broadcast television requires CEA-608; web video needs WebVTT or SRT. By generating all formats automatically, MediaScribe ensures your content can be distributed accessibly across all channels.
Local File Storage & Archival
Robust local storage designed for government archival requirements—automatic saving to configurable directories, organized folder structures, and support for NAS and external drives.
- Configurable retention policies
- Metadata preservation for searchability
- Caption files stored with video assets
- Export for offsite backup or transfer
- Support FOIA and public records requests
Government agencies must retain public meeting records for specified periods. Local storage ensures accessible versions—complete with captions and transcripts—are preserved alongside original recordings for FOIA requests and legal proceedings.
Simple to Operate, Easy to Manage
Presets, flexible inputs, voice synthesis, and system monitoring that make day-to-day operation effortless.
Preset Configuration System
Create reusable configurations for different meeting types, venues, and accessibility requirements. Save language settings, input sources, vocabularies, and speaker profiles.
Why it matters: Presets ensure accessibility settings are correctly applied every time, regardless of which staff member operates the system.
Flexible Input Sources
Accept video from professional broadcast equipment, network streams, or uploaded files. SDI, RTMP, RTSP, HLS—MediaScribe adapts to your infrastructure.
Why it matters: Implement accessible captioning without replacing existing cameras, encoders, or video systems.
Voice Synthesis for Translations
Generate spoken audio for translated captions using natural-sounding neural text-to-speech. Convert translated text to spoken audio in multiple languages with selectable voice options.
Why it matters: For individuals who are blind or have low vision but don't speak English, synthesized audio provides access that captions alone cannot offer.
System Monitoring & Logs
Comprehensive monitoring and logging for reliable operation. Real-time dashboard with device status, audio levels, transcription progress, and connection status for all services.
Why it matters: Accessibility features only provide value when they work reliably. Monitoring ensures issues are identified before they impact accessibility.
Purpose-Built Gateway
MediaScribe uses a hybrid hardware-cloud architecture: a compact, rack-mountable gateway connects directly to your existing A/V infrastructure via standard SDI connections, while cloud processing handles the heavy AI workload.
- Standard 2U rack-mount form factor
- SDI input/output (HD-SDI, 3G-SDI)
- Ethernet for cloud connectivity
- Hybrid architecture for reliability and scale
- Local hardware + cloud AI processing
See the Platform in Action
Schedule a personalized demo to see how MediaScribe transforms your meetings into fully accessible content.