This is super easy.   But a caveat… we have a BIG feature request for Google and MS regarding this technology.

So here is a recording I made using QuickTime Player on a Mac, of myself giving a test presentation in Google Slides.  You will notice that there is no audio.  I think that I don’t have the audio setup right for QT, but in a way it illustrates the power of this ASR.  Technical problems happen while we are teaching.  It does happen.  In this case, because I was using ASR in Google Slides, you can still receive my presentation through sight.

Hover over the video and click on the icon with the box and arrow, to make the video larger, so you can read the live captions.

Next I try the same basic idea in MS Power Point.  It is slightly more complicated to activate, but still not an overwhelming obstacle.  I also fixed my QuickTime Player audio for this recording. MS uses their own “intelligent services” for the captioning, whereas Google used the Macs built in speech recognition.

Now for the Caveat.  When you are finished, the captions aren’t saved.  If I hadn’t done screen recordings, I wouldn’t even have this much.  So you can’t use them for individuals who would have been employing a screen reader, and you can’t use this to jump start your production of a transcript.  This is only for producing captions during a live talk and only useful for sighted individuals.

If you are interested in using ASR for successfully making your course recordings accessible and even fully ADA compliant, please look into turning on ASR within echo360.org by using this form.

This is a cross post from you.stonybrook.edu/jadams