Online TV Captioning of Czech Parliamentary Sessions

In the paper we introduce the on-line captioning system developed by our teams and used by the Czech Television (CTV), the public service broadcaster in the Czech Republic. The research project is targeted at incorporation of speech technologies into the CTV environment. One of the key missions is the development of captioning system supporting captioning of a “live” acoustic track. It can be either the real audio stream or the audio stream produced by a shadow speaker. Another key mission is to develop software tools and techniques usable for training the shadow speakers. During the initial phases of the project we concluded that the broadcasting of the Parliamentary meetings of the Chamber of Deputies fulfills the necessary conditions that enable it to be captioned without the aid of the shadow speaker. We developed a fully automatic captioning pilot system making the broadcasting of Parliamentary meetings of the Chamber of Deputies accessible to the hearing impaired viewers. The pilot run enabled us and our partners in the Czech TV to develop and evaluate the complete captioning infrastructure and collect, review and possibly implement opinions and suggestions of the targeted audience. This paper presents our experience gathered during first years of the project to the public audience.