Sopratext Venue Live Speech-To-Text App.
Making Post-show discussions more Cost-Effective
We recently worked on the “Rockbottom” National Dance Tour where we successfully managed to reduce overall Access Costs by combining the output of Captioning and pre-recorded Audio Description files. This made offering both types of Access at every performance far more affordable.
However, Producer Vicki Balaam’s ambition was to make every aspect of the show fully accessible and it became clear that employing a Speech-to-Text Reporter, on-site or remotely, at very show for the post-show discussion which was an integral part of the show, was a financial problem. As a result, we decided to explore whether using an Automatic Live Speech-To- Text Application could offer a cost-effective solution.
The outcome is that Digital , working in conjunction with Signblazer Ltd, has launched an application that opens into our Sopratext Venue Software and will automatically output Live Speech-To-Text onto any of our connected display devices.
This has tremendous potential cost benefits for accessing Post-Show Discussions, but it does mean that they need to be managed in a slightly different way. For example, speakers will need to “self declare” before contributing so that our client audience is clear exactly who is speaking and it is a good practice that questions from the floor are repeated by the Chair before the panel answers them.
Whilst we believe that our new application works well and offers good access – we would compare it with using a remote speech-to-text reporter – it does not yet work as consistently well as a top-notch on-site STTR. But just as there is now a place in our Theatres for Manually Output and Automatic Captioning, we think that there is definitely a place for both Live Speech-T0-Text and the use of Automatic Speech-to-Text for Post-Show Discussions.
Please contact us if you have any questions or want more information on how to make your Post-Show discussions accessible.
