Closed Captions

Live Automated Closed Captioning

Here is how to use caption.ninja to create closed captions for an event, be it livestreamed or not. Please note that this tool is "free" to use, but uses the Google Voice API, and you must ask permission from speakers before piping their voices to google's AI

full readme of caption ninja: https://github.com/steveseguin/captionninja

Requirements

• a computer
• internet connection
• google chrome
• master audio of the stream / space
• (optional) a display to show the captions

You need to be able to pipe the master audio of the stream/space as microphone input in your computer. Usually, the technician will be able to provide this to your headphone/mic jack.

Steps

Making Captions

1. Open Google Chrome 🤮
2. Visit https://caption.ninja/
   1. you will be redirected to page with a custom ROOM-ID. so the url will look like this: https://caption.ninja/?room=ROOM-ID&lang=en-US
   2. copy the room ID.
3. The site will ask permission to use your microphone; click "allow"
4. The site should just work. So if you speak out loud, it will print what you say.
5. Click the microphone icon on the right side of the address bar
   1. choose the appropriate audio input for the captions, wich dooesnt have to be your microphone.
   2. if you are collecting audio from an event in a space, ask the audio technician to provide the master output to your mic jack
      1. it should appear in the input list

Viewing Captions

1. Bring back your ROOM-ID from earlier
2. Visit this URL in any browser: https://caption.ninja/overlay?room=ROOM-ID
3. Anyone from anywhere can view these captions in their browser. So:
   1. if your event is onsite: open URL on a secondary display where viewers in the space read the captios while listening along
      1. it's possible that the display is too small, so make sure the audience can see the URL (or QR code) so they can follow in their phones too
   2. if your event is online: share the URL with your audience in the chat so they can also follow along

Saving Captions

1. Go to your first URL, if you've produced any captions, there will be a button to "download caption file" in the top left corner of the page
2. You can download the .srt file. This file is good companion for a video or audio recordig of your event
3. Consider making an access copy of your caption file. This is a pdf that has the captions pasted in it, but is also enriched with
   1. manually corrected guesses
   2. speaker names, pronouns
   3. audio descriptions of other sounds than voices