Closed captioning glitch

[Joel S. Berson]

Sounds right on.  Not exactly spelling correction, rather spelling completion.

The real time captioning seems too often a day late and a sentence
short.  Is anyone working on using voice recognition software?

Joel

At 1/3/2012 01:11 PM, Alice Faber wrote:
>On 1/3/12 12:21 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>Seen in a closed caption on a WCVB Boston (channel 5) news broadcast
>>last night, as the location of a news event:
>>
>>WITHOUTBURN
>>
>>The announcer had said "Woburn."
>>
>>Presumably from "w/o burn", but I am unable to figure out how "w/o"
>>could have been seen, or how "without" could have been heard.  The
>>only explanation I can hypothesize is that the captioning person (or
>>thing) typed "WOBURN" and a spell-checking thing (exorcist?)
>>corrected that to WITHOUTBURN (without an internal space).
>
>It's an autocorrect type thing. The captioner presumably was using one
>of those CART machines (sort of like a courtroom transcriber uses). As
>far as I can tell (one of the blogs I regularly follow is by someone who
>does captioning for classes and public lectures), users preload these
>machines with abbreviations and the like that are auto-expanded. "wo"
>for "without" would make perfect sense as a pre-load.
>
>--
>==============================================================================
>Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
>Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
>New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org