NCI Sees 160% Increase in Demand for Captioning Amid COVID

The National Captioning Institute (NCI) reported 160 percent growth in the number of real-time hours it captioned online between March 2020 and March 2021 because of sharp increases in remote educational classes, corporate meetings, government sessions, and other live streaming content brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

NCI turned to CaptionSentry, its proprietary captioning service that uses speech-to-text technology to transform real-time audio into closed captions. CaptionSentry proved to meet capacity and quality demands. Clients are now using CaptionSentry for a variety of programs, including local news coverage and financial and sports talk shows. ASR has ultimately played an important role in ensuring access to all types of content.

"The dramatic surge in virtual corporate events and online educational content has saturated the market with opportunity," said Meredith Patterson, NCI's senior vice president for operations and chief operating officer, in a statement. "The profound demand for captioning continues unabated. In addition to our ever-expanding core of human captioners, CaptionSentry has proven vital to our ability to fulfill our mission of accessibility."