captionscan

captionscan is a software tool designed to automate the creation, extraction, and synchronization of captions for video and audio content. It is intended to improve accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, support multilingual captioning, and enhance searchability and indexing of media.

captionscan combines several technologies, including automatic speech recognition to transcribe spoken content, optical character recognition to capture on-screen text and embedded subtitles, and text and scene analysis to detect speaker changes and delimiters. It offers forced alignment to refine timing, robustness to noise, punctuation restoration, and support for multiple languages and dialects.

The typical workflow involves ingesting media or transcripts, running transcription and text extraction, aligning captions with the source timeline, and reviewing or editing results. Outputs include common caption formats such as SRT, WebVTT, TTML, and JSON for integration with media players and content management systems. captionscan provides API or plugin interfaces for developers and supports cloud-based processing or local deployment, with options for automated workflows and human-in-the-loop review.

Applications for captionscan span video hosting platforms, educational content, live broadcasting, and archival projects. It supports accessibility compliance with standards such as WCAG and ADA, and can improve search indexing and translation workflows. Limitations include potential errors from automatic speech recognition in noisy or overlapping dialogue, challenges with multilingual accuracy, and timing of non-speech events. Ongoing improvements depend on model updates, user feedback, and alignment with evolving captioning standards and formats.