Automatically Caption a Live Broadcast

A step by step guide for adding LIVE captions to your broadcast

Josh Mathus avatar
Written by Josh Mathus
Updated over a week ago

BoxCast gives you the ability to have automated captions appear on your live broadcast. This gives your viewers the opportunity to watch with captions both during the live broadcast and once it's archived.

Live captions are not available on all plans. Book a meeting with your customer success manager, email us, or upgrade in the self checkout to add this feature to your plan.

Set up Automated Live Captioning

Schedule a broadcast and fill out all the information as you normally would.

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Click on Advanced Settings and select Automated Live Captioning.

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Now the broadcast will automatically caption the broadcast with no additional set up.

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Manage Automated Live Captioning

Enable or disable live captioning

You can disable captions mid-stream by going into the BoxCast Dashboard, going to the broadcast details page on your live broadcast, and clicking on the Captions tab. When enabled, the status indicator will display as green.

Just remember that there is a slight delay on the stream, so turning on or off the captioning will line up with what is happening in real time, not what is happening on screen. For example, if you want to pause captions while you're streaming live music, you should turn off the captioning while the music is playing live. If you are watching the stream instead, and wait for the music to stop playing before you flip the captions on, the change will also be delayed.

Review and edit your captions

You cannot edit the captions during the live event, but you are able to edit the captions after the broadcast with our caption editing tool.

Simply click the text to change what you want it to say. Play using the player on the right, and watch as the blue line tracks through and highlights the caption that is currently being played. This is the best way to review an entire broadcast. Click the play button on each line to skip to that part of the broadcast.

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Review Warnings

During the process of creating automated captions, we are able to identify places where there might be some uncertainty about whether the generated words are correct or not. The captions with higher uncertainty are shown with a warning in red. We recommend that you review every line, but if you are limited on time, start by editing only the captions with the highest uncertainty first. You can filter to only show these by clicking the settings icon in the top right corner then selecting Review Warning Only of the editing tool.

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Find and Replace

Within the settings, you will also see a Find and Replace tool. We recommend using this for names and other proper nouns or other uncommon words. For example, when captioning our own webinars, we often have to change "Box cars" to "BoxCast."

Edit Timestamp

This allows you to control when a caption shows up on the screen.

Filter Profanity

BoxCast has a "Filter Profanity" option that will help prevent mispronounced words not show up as swear words. This is enabled for your account automatically.

Add a Caption

You can add a new line at the end of the list of captions by selecting Insert Cue After.

When you are finished editing, you can click Publish. It will take a few minutes for those captions to process and be live for your viewers in the BoxCast Player. Feel free to leave the page. No further action is required to push those captions live.

Common Questions

Can viewers turn on/off the captions?
Yes. There is a CC toggle to enable/disable captions in the player.

How can I improve the quality of the automatically generated captions?
The quality of the captions is determined by the quality and clarity of the audio input. A single speaker with a good microphone will perform well, but a crowded room with multiple speakers and on-camera audio will be much harder for the automated caption tool to pick out the right words. You can also add custom vocabulary (IE: the name of your organization or city.)

Do the captions show up on the BoxCast.tv App for Apple TV, Roku & FireTV?
Yes!

Can I add captions automatically to a recorded broadcast?

Yes! Check out this article to learn more

What languages are supported?

Currently, English is the only supported language. Translation or transcripts of other spoken languages is not supported.

Will these captions show up everywhere that I streamed the broadcast?

Closed captions will populate for live or archived broadcasts on any BoxCast viewer experience: BoxCast embedded Player, BoxCast.tv, and BoxCast Apps for Apple TV and Roku.

Unfortunately, the captions will NOT populate for live streaming or exports to external platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, X (Twitter), Vimeo, etc.

Does this support embedded captions via RTMP such as CEA-608, CEA-708, DVB-T, DVB-S, WST?

No. We only support automatically generated captions or separated captions like WebVTT files.

Can the automatically generated captions be downloaded?

Yes! We allow the transcribe of the captions to be downloaded into a WebVTT file or a Text file.

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Can I have every broadcast captioned automatically?

If you want your broadcasts to always be captioned go to Settings, Preferences, then click on Edit in the Automated Captioning area and select Always Caption Broadcasts under the Defaults section.

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Can captions be re-positioned in the player window?

No. The captions will only display near the bottom of the broadcast, so keep in mind that they will interfere with lower-third content.

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