Peter's Blog

I reckon it must be voice recognition ... quite often.

Many mistakes are made and can be quite funny.

I suspect this is what they are using. http://www.softel.co.uk/Document_1.asp?category=3&id=19139&id=19130&id=18346&id=27557 My suspicion is based on having worked there. They used to employ stenographers, who were the best option for keeping up with spoken text in real time, but the skill came in maintaining the stenography dictionary (unique to each stenographer) and not making mistakes online.

The link appears to be broken but I did see something about it on BBC this recently. Apparently they have people who type at a special keyboard that works phonetically so essentially they are typing in the sounds and a piece of magic turns that into words. They said that the typists must be more than 95% accurate or they are not let on air.

The quality of real time subtitles is quite variable: on Meridian TV local news it is pretty poor and struggles to keep up with the dialogue, missing entire sentances. I was watching a program on channel 5 and the subtitles were about a minute behind the spoken word, often relating to the previous scene. On the cruddier channels (ITV2 etc) they don't always have subtitles.

Subtitles are useful as you can follow a program over screaming kids/wife talking about something or other (remember to nod now and then).

Peter

It is annoying when words are left out such as a question on Weakest Link and at other times on some programmes, the punch line. Admitted I do get a laugh at some of the mispellings. I do think it's wonderful that most programmes now are subtitled, Thirty years ago if I remember we only had one a week and I think that was only on the BBC John