Saturday, June 15, 2013

Closed Captioning Bloopers?

Tonight, while I did my walk, I watched Tavis Smiley interview foreign policy guru Richard Haas about his new book. The TV was on mute so that I could listen to music at the same time.

At one point, the closed captioning crawl on the bottom of the screen quoted Haas as saying that he didn't advocate "American in a lateral is him."

Clearly, while it's come a long way, voice recognition technology is less than perfect.

But it made me wonder if Amazon carried books containing closed captioning "bloopers." It seemed like an irresistible topic for some enterprising publisher looking to make a fast buck. But, in fact, after trying several different search phrases, I found nothing.

My faith in the publishing world is restored. Sort of.

There also aren't any DVDs of closed captioning mistakes, proving that Dick Clark really is gone.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I was looking for article on captioning bloopers and came across this. However, your statement about voice recognition software compelled me to respond. Real time captioning is not done by voice recognition. It is provided by captioner using a court reporting machine. Because the machine transcribes based on sounds not letters errors are inevitable. Live broadcast captioners rarely have the opportunity to correct these errors without missing part of the broadcast. As a hoh of hearing person I find them both funny and frustrating.