For Video Call consultation participants who are deaf or hard of hearing, it can be challenging to fully participate in online verbal communications. Live captioning provides access to spoken dialogue displayed on the screen in real-time. Live captions can be generated in a Video Call with the press of a button.

You will get the best experience using this application with headphones. If not, your speaker may produce an echo sound that can feed back into your microphone. This can result in the participant being misidentified by the application.

Please note the following requirements: 

• To generate Live Captions in your Video Call please use the Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Apple Safari browser. Mozilla Firefox does not support the Live Captions application.
• Android devices do not currently support Live Captions
• iOS participants (iPhones and iPads) need to click on the Live Captions button to see the captions once the host has enabled them in the call.

Watch the video:

To generate Live Captions during a Video Call:

The Live Captions button is located in the control buttons along the bottom of the Video Call screen. Click on the Live Captions (CC) button to start generating live captions.
Please note: If not enabled in the clinic, this button will not appear in the Video Call screen. Please contact your clinic administrator for more information.

Click to Start live captions. Clicking this button will toggle the captions on and off the screen, but will not start a new session in the same call.

Participants will be asked to provide consent and the app then displays the audio from call participants as text, for everyone in the call to view. If a participant does not consent, their speech will not be captioned. There are two options for the design of Live captions during a call. This is set at the clinic admin level for all calls in the clinic. 

Compact mode, shown here, displays live captions in a text box that can be moved to a convenient location in the Video Call screen. Stop the captions generating by clicking the green square button at top right. The live captions box can be moved to a convenient location in the call screen and resized as required, by clicking and dragging from the bottom right corner.

If Compact mode is not set in the clinic, the captions appear in a screen to the right of the participants (similar to shared resources). The participant initials appear next to their speech, for ease of identification.

There is a Settings cog at the top right of the live captions window in Compact mode. Click General to adjust the font size for your view or end the transcription for all participants. Hosts in the call can also export the transcript to PDF, for the patient's record. The PDF will save to the location your device downloads are set to. Remember the transcript will not persist in the Video Call service once the call ends, so must be downloaded before the call ends, if needed.

Click Participants to view the participants in the call and to see who has consented. Clicking the grey CC button next to their name will toggle their captions on and off, if required.