Ericsson & BBC Team on Live-Captioning Tech

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson and BBC R&D recently collaborated on new technology that is designed to address the latency of live captioning for television. What the two companies came up with reportedly minimizes live caption delays with the audio they match up with by utilizing the time needed to compress audio and video streams for transmission and distribution.

With captions taking less time to encode, the new technology uses a compensating delay to ensure pre-prepared captions that are synchronized with the audio. The compensating delay can be decreased during live broadcasts to further reduce any delay.

The platform is able to support live captioning in a number of languages, according to Ericsson, by using speech-to-text, newsroom integration and rapid offline content preparation.

BBC plans to roll out the new technology across its channels over the summer. Ericsson also plans to offer the service to additional clients around the world.