Captioning the Mobile World Congress

You might be thrown into an in-depth discussion of canine super-senses or an immediate reaction to the unsporting side of sport – and that was just last Sunday afternoon. That’s why the process of producing real-time captions is a combination of diligent preparation, software manipulation and quick-thinking solutions for the appearance of left-field content. Plus a bit more preparation, just to be on the safe side.

It’s an approach that, overall, gets excellent results. Accuracy and latency continue to improve, as progressively more text is formatted prior to transmission and respoken captions are captured, corrected and re-used where appropriate. When you add that to a growing understanding that captions can play a key role in the content discovery space, and Ericsson’s significant presence at the world’s largest mobile technology conference, there was an ideal opportunity to show off our skills.

As the official broadcast partner for Mobile World Live (MWL) TV, a small team of captioners provided 38 hours of coverage over the four official show days of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Fittingly, given the event as a whole is focused on advances in the Networked Society and its associated innovations, most of the team were working remotely from the UK. Within the Ericsson stand, however, was a small soundproofed booth, with a viewing partition in the back, in which two “demonstration models” could be seen producing the captioned content broadcast around the venue and surrounding areas.

MWL TV had a recognisable structure, of the kind used by rolling news broadcasters. There were regular bulletins, coverage of all the major press conferences and keynote speeches, expert analysis, pre-recorded interviews, live vox-pops and adverts. The content, however, presented several challenges. MWC 2015 had over 2,100 exhibitors, any of whom could be featured in the coverage. Every product launch was, of course, shrouded in secrecy, so there was no way to know the new Sony smartphone was going to be called the Xperia M4 Aqua in advance. You’re also dealing with a particular industry’s expertise, its accompanying specialist vocabulary and precise conceptual articulation. The big themes of Congress included net neutrality, mobile money, wearables and 5G, and those are just the ones the average tech-savvy tourist wandering down La Rambla might have heard of. And then there was John Cleese.

The preparation for such unfamiliar and jargon-heavy subject matter occasionally felt a little like being a freshly-arrived Martian assigned to caption The Masters (which incidentally, has a comparable output profile). Ultimately, however, the techniques and technology which we apply to any live news and sport – such as dynamic vocabulary lists, team communication, recycling text where possible – proved more than capable of producing high-quality captions in a specialised broadcast environment. In addition, the centrepiece of MWL TV’s coverage was the two keynote speeches from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. That meant two hours of good, old-fashioned respeaking, a further showcase of live captioning’s efficacy and its power to increase broadcast content’s reach and impact.

Overall, the process of captioning MWL TV was a great success. It provided attendees with an additional service, and gave the live captioning team the opportunity to employ their range of skills on a whole new demographic. In a specialised broadcast setting, we learned more about our own and the software’s capabilities, new expertise that can be applied to our traditional broadcast platforms and further improve our overall service. But perhaps the most important lesson of all was that it’s really quite off-putting when someone’s recording you on a studio camera while you’re on air…

Chloe Gallagher, Live Captioner.