AI Media (Australia) Launches "Live Captioning" System

2008 Google Developer Day in Australia: Dan Morrill talks about GPhone and Android. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

AI Media is an Australian social enterprise, who’s mission is to establish a method by which teachers in a classroom can lecture students, and the lecture will automatically appear as text on the student’s Laptop. The system works in all formats, including iOs, OSX and Android.

The idea is that the teacher wears a lapel microphone, which streams her voice to a remote station, online. A reader than re-speaks her

Screenshot of what the text would look like for a student. Image courtesy of
http://ow.ly/i/11VMi

words into a server, which captions and streams it back out to the student’s computer or other Internet aware device.

They claim that this can replace three people in the classroom. An Auslan (Australian Sign Language) interpreter, a speaker and a note taker. I’m not sure what all these people would do. It seems to me that a terp could handle the entire job, but nonetheless their point is a valid one. It’s not that we want to put interpreters out of work – replace them with machines, but rather that there are insufficient trained and qualified interpreters available. This system can cover that disparity. It can also help cash strapped schools offer inclusion where they couldn’t otherwise afford the huge costs associated with providing interpreters for every classroom.

This video, from their site, explains more fully.

Here’s the site’s link:

http://ai-live.com/

Save Auslan courses – Save Auslan TAFE Diploma course protest (Photo credit: Takver)

 

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