Since this type of captioning relies on technology that may struggle with accents and vocal inflections, automated captioning can often be poor, nonsensical, and unreliable. These captions also often leave out important non-verbal sounds, meaning that content may not be fully captioned. 

Problems with Automated Captioning

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, most American schools moved to an entirely virtual course model via the usage of video lectures. To comply with federal regulations for federally funded institutions, all lectures would need to be captioned. Since it would be too time and cost intensive to manually create captions for each lecture, automated captions are often used instead.

Usage of Automated Captioning in Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Through the use of artificial intelligence, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is designed to capture every sound spoken, and will display a word for each utterance without regards to its accuracy or whether it makes sense in context. In order to do this, ASR makes a “best guess” for words and phrases. 


The Design of ASR


A program has automated captioning, or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), if the text is generated by a speech recognition or translation program instead of a person. This is often used on social media websites, such as YouTube and Facebook, due to the vast amount of visual content on these websites. 

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- Closed Captioning
- Open Captioning
- Automated Captioning

Types of Captioning

Ellcessor, E. (2011). Captions On, Off, on TV, Online: Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization in Online Closed Captioning. Television & New Media, 13(4), 329–352. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476411425251

Captions On, Off, on TV, Online: Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization in Online Closed Captioning

A program has open captioning if the text always appears on the broadcast, without any way to turn it off. For example, silent movies can be considered to have open captions, as the intertitles contain text that help to tell the film's story.

Open Captioning

A program has closed captioning if the text does not normally appear on the broadcast. The viewer will have to manually activate the captions in order for them to appear. For example, most Hollywood movies on DVD, Blu-Ray, or streaming services have closed captioning.

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