Google+ Hangouts - Now With Live Captions

With the announcement of Google Plus and Google Hangouts, many people have taken advantage of the service and hanging out with nine other friends online, except the hearing-impaired. Now Google has a solution.

Recently, Google announced at the National Association of the Deaf’s annual conference in Louisville, KY that a new app for Google Plus Hangouts that makes Hangouts more accessible for the hearing-impaired. Titles Hangout Captions transcribes people communications so that the hearing-impaired can read what other people in the hangouts are talking.

As of right now, the service has two options of transcription, a professional transcription through StreamText, and a basic transcription service in which users can type on the keyboard themselves.

“By adding the +Hangout Captions app, you can either connect live text from a professional transcriptionist to your Hangout, or type right into a text box yourself to transcribe a Hangout for your friends,”

– Naomi Black (technical program manager for accessibility engineering)

As of right now, Google did not add in a machine-transcribed service used in other Google services like Google Voice and YouTube; though it is most likely that Google will add that in later on so that users will not need to type in what a user said.

Google has released a video explaining the service.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvWvK3uhPpM