The best way to judge live captions is to see them handle your own meeting: your council members, your street names, your public commenters. Here is how to run that test and what to look for when the results come back.
Why test with your own recording
A vendor demo usually uses clean audio and generic speech. Your meetings are different. They have local names, motions and item numbers, people talking over each other, and residents speaking at the podium for the first time. Some of those speakers may be speaking Spanish at public comment.
A test on your own recording shows you how captions handle the words that actually come up in your chamber. It also gives your staff something concrete to compare, instead of a sales claim.
With SentraCaptions, you can send us a recording of a past meeting through the contact form. We caption and translate it so you can judge the accuracy yourself.
Pick the right recording and what to send
Choose a recording that looks like a normal meeting, not your best one. A good test recording has:
- Public comment, with several different speakers at the podium.
- Lots of local names: council members, staff, streets, neighborhoods and programs.
- Spanish speakers at public comment, if that happens in your meetings.
- Typical audio from your usual room and microphones, so the test reflects real conditions.
Send only a recording of a public meeting that is already public. Do not send closed session audio.
Along with the recording, tell us which languages you want to see. SentraCaptions supports captions and live translation in 75 languages, up to 8 per meeting. If you can, include a short list of local names. That list becomes the start of a glossary so captions spell those names right.
How to review the results
Plan to spend some time with the recording and the captions side by side. A simple process:
- Read the English captions while you play the recording. Mark anything that is wrong or hard to follow.
- Check the details that matter for a meeting. Names, agenda item numbers, dollar amounts, motions and votes are where errors cause the most confusion.
- Sort the errors. Was it a local name the system didn't know? A word lost to poor audio or crosstalk? A translation problem? Different errors have different fixes.
- Ask a fluent speaker to review each language that matters most to you. Translation quality varies by language, so don't assume one good language means all are good.
- Look at the files you would actually use. SentraCaptions transcripts come in every language as TXT or SRT (subtitle) files, so check that they fit how your office works.
Remember that a first pass may be a baseline. Many name errors are the kind that a glossary or an autocorrect rule fixes. When you review, note which errors would go away once your local names are added. Our article on improving live caption accuracy explains those tools.
What a recording test can't tell you
A recording test is mainly about the words. A few things are worth knowing separately:
- Timing. In our own tests, captions typically appear about a second after speech, and the sentence in progress updates live. A recording test shows accuracy, not the live experience in your chamber.
- Language coverage. Speech recognition is English, with Spanish speakers at public comment recognized too. Hmong and Khmer are not supported. If your community needs those languages, plan for them another way.
- Individual accommodations. Automatic captions are a practical way to make meetings easier to follow. They do not replace CART for every situation. If a deaf resident requests CART as an accommodation, your agency should consider that request. See machine captions vs CART.
- Legal questions. A test tells you how well captions work, not what your agency is required to do. Check with your city attorney or county counsel on that.
Questions to ask alongside the test
Accuracy is one part of the decision. While you review the results, it helps to ask any vendor:
- Does it work with the encoder we already use, or does it need new hardware? SentraCaptions is added as one more RTMP or SRT destination on encoders such as Pearl, OBS and vMix.
- Can we pause captions for recess or closed session, and is anything stored or billed while paused?
- Are captions clearly labeled as automatic, with a note that they may contain errors?
- Can residents read along on their phones without an app or sign-in?
- Can staff correct errors, live or afterward?
- How is pricing calculated? SentraCaptions quotes based on hours of meetings and number of languages, with no per-viewer fees and no hardware.
For a longer checklist, see questions to ask a live captioning vendor.
Next steps
When you are ready, send a past meeting recording through our contact form and tell us which languages you want to see. You can also read more on these pages:
- Features, including the full language list
- Pricing
- Security
- A caption glossary for local names
- AI captions vs human captioners