A year ago, virtual meetings happened fairly infrequently, and it was always a bit of a hoot trying to get everyone set up at the same time. Now we’ve all been working at home for the last year or so, jumping on Zoom, Google Meets, or Microsoft Teams seems almost second nature!
There are, however, many issues, and one of the biggest complaints is not being able to hear or understand the speaker. One way to solve this is with captioning. Here are five reasons you should invest in live captioning software for your next meeting or webinar.
Help Employees Concentrate
Let’s face it; not everyone has the best presentation voice. In fact, most people are pretty terrible at doing a presentation in the flesh, let alone over a webinar, and this can cause a real problem if your employees are likely to get distracted. Sometimes it’s not the speaker’s fault, it can be the source material too, and there’s no way to make every topic thoroughly thrilling for everyone.
Live captions allow employees to read along as well as listen along, and yes, they can mute the sound if the speaker hasn’t got the most entertaining of voices and still stay “in the room.”
Minimize Distractions
Working from home, employees can find themselves distracted by all sorts of things. The kids might be asking for homework help, spouses are cooking dinner (or even attending their own virtual meeting), and even next door’s dog is barking incessantly. It’s not always possible to mute the outside world, but at least with automatic captioning software, they won’t miss out on the content of the meeting.
Assist Non-Native Speakers
If your business employs non-native speakers of English, they may find it hard to listen along with someone who has a particularly strong accent or someone who speaks very fast. In the UK, the Essex accent is known as one of the fastest English accents in the world, and even native speakers can find it tough to keep up!
By having the text on the screen, non-native speakers (or even those who are finding the speaker’s accent tough to decipher) can keep up with the meeting without trying to figure out what was said five minutes ago.
Be Inclusive To Employees With Hearing Issues
Hearing issues affect thousands of people, and many don’t struggle in a real-world situation, but listening over Zoom can be a challenge, particularly if the speakers in an echoey room. This issue can be alleviated by using live captioning because no matter how poor the audio, the live captions will help everyone keep up.
Minimize Miscommunication
Virtual meetings can be a great way to keep everyone organized, but if there’s no record of what was said and by whom, it’s easy for miscommunication to happen, and that could cost your business thousands in wasted man-hours. As well as live captioning the meeting, being able to download a transcript of the meeting is a fantastic way of confirming what was said and what needs to be done.