ENCO showcased a ground-breaking addition to the company’s enCaption family of automated closed captioning solutions at the NAB Show New York exhibition. The new enCaption4 builds on the product line’s proven power and efficiency with further leaps forward in accuracy and speed, while offering flexible on-premises or cloud-based deployment options.

ENCO’s software-defined enCaption solutions provide accurate closed captioning for both live and pre-recorded content in near-real-time. enCaption4’s new speech-to-text engine takes this accuracy to an unprecedented new level, leveraging breakthroughs in machine learning technology to develop a deep neural network approach to voice recognition.

This exactitude is further enhanced by a dictionary database three times larger than previous enCaption solutions, while integration with popular newsroom computer systems (NRCS) takes advantage of news scripts and rundowns to learn and validate the spelling of local names and terminology. The result is greater automated captioning accuracy across a full array of program types, ranging from fast and dynamic sports play-by-play to slower-paced informational shows.

enCaption4 similarly improves end-to-end captioning latency, cutting in half the time between spoken words and their corresponding on-screen caption representation. Generating captions in live, real-time environments faster than human stenographers, the solution improves the viewing experience for hearing-impaired audiences with much closer synchronization between captions and actual speech.

enCaption4 is available as an on-premises system or as a cloud-based solution running on Amazon Web Services, giving customers the freedom to choose their preferred deployment model. The addition of a cloud-based offering to the enCaption family enables users to minimize on-premises equipment while leveraging the vast scalability, resource availability and multi-location collaborative benefits of public cloud platforms.

enCaption4 is anticipated to release this month. The existing enCaption3 system will continue to be available and actively developed, becoming ENCO’s entry-level automated captioning solution.