New career: voice captioning - Military Careers, Second Careers - Air Force Times

New career: voice captioning

DES MOINES, Iowa — While Danielle Edwards is teaching, her students are talking. A lot. Only she doesn’t mind.

In fact, the more they talk the better their grade — but only if what they’re saying is correct.

Edwards’ class is perhaps the best-kept secret at AIB College of Business, where for the past year a handful of students have been exploring a new corner in the world of real-time reporting: voice captioning.

The field is so new, in fact, that only a few schools in the country provide training for it. This fall, Des Moines-based AIB will become the first to offer a degree in it.

“What we’re doing really is revolutionary,” said Peter Jepsen, a real-time reporting instructor who helped launch the voice captioning pilot program last year. “There’s a growing demand for people trained in this field, and there are jobs — very good jobs — for our grads.”

Nearly all of the voice captioning students at AIB switched over from the more traditional stenography program, which trains them to record conversations by typing on a small machine. This method of reporting is often seen in courtrooms, but it has also been used to caption television shows for the hearing impaired.

Voice captioning, however, does not require any typing, and the “record” being taken can be seen almost instantly by others. Wearing a headset and speaking into a microphone, voice captioners simply repeat what is being said in real time, and the transcript appears on a computer screen — punctuation marks and all.

The practice already is being used around the country for television programs, but Edwards said many businesses are quickly realizing the benefits, too. Earnings reports, board meetings or conference calls that may involve a hearing-impaired employee can all be conducted more efficiently with voice captioning, she said.

“When you think of captioning, you tend to think of TV,” Edwards said. “But really, there’s an unlimited number of uses for this practice.”

Take, for instance, a recent AIB graduate who lives in Winterset, Iowa, but captions lectures every day for a hearing-impaired college student in another state. Voice captioners can work from practically anywhere, Jepsen said, because the technology only requires that they hear what is being said and run the software that automatically transcribes it. The transcripts can then appear in real time wherever the captioner directs them to go.

AIB voice captioning graduates are currently working on the 2007 pledging campaign for Iowa Public Television as well, Jepsen said. After graduating, all found jobs in the field — which typically pay $45 an hour to start, he said.

The captioning software is loaded on students’ laptops, which create voice models that help “train” the computer to recognize their individual voices and manners of speech. Edwards said she aims for a more than 96 percent accuracy rate for students captioning 180 words per minute.

“They have to learn how to enunciate without talking like robots,” she said. “They have to remember it’s not another person interpreting what we’re saying, it’s a computer.”

While the more traditional stenography method is not 100 percent perfect because of “the human element,” voice captioning has “the equipment element,” Edwards said. One student’s typed transcript had the computer changing “unfortunately” to “all smelly,” for example.

The age range of students taking the program also has impressed Jepsen, who said even some longtime steno reporters are interested in transitioning into voice captioning because of carpal tunnel ailments that stem from hours of typing.

Areal Stoulil, 19, said she was struggling in the stenography program at AIB when her mother told her she had “found the perfect job for me.”

Laughed Stoulil: “She said I’d get to talk a lot. I like to talk.”