Web Captioner was built by me, Curt Grimes, to meet a need at my local church.
In early 2017, a deaf person started attending weekly services at my church in northern Illinois in the United States. We had to figure out a way to make services more accessible to him. The church preferred to not hire an interpreter or pay for expensive remote captioning.
The church first looked at some commercially available speech-to-text solutions, but they provided mixed results: performance was poor, the software had to be retrained often, and they just didn't seem like they were built to be a reliable live speech-to-text solution that displayed caption output attractively by default.
When I discovered that Google Chrome has some impressively accurate built-in speech-to-text capabilities, I created a quick proof of concept to see if this could be a solution. I shared that proof-of-concept with a Facebook group dedicated to church media and production topics and it received lots of positive attention — I knew I was onto something here.
I turned my proof-of-concept into a packaged product and gave it the name Web Captioner. And today, churches around the world join my local church in using it to caption their services. In addition to churches, though, Web Captioner almost immediately captured the interest of the live streaming community as well. In response to requests from live streamers, I continue to refine Web Captioner to make it integrate well with popular video production software.
I continue to develop Web Captioner in my free time alongside my full-time job in web development at a public university.
