Live Captions by Subanana

Product Introduction

1. Definition: Live Captions by Subanana is a real-time AI-powered speech-to-text and translation platform designed for live events, webinars, and public speaking. It is a specialized tool within the AI transcription, live captioning, and localization software category.
2. Core Value Proposition: It exists to eliminate language and accessibility barriers in live settings by providing instant, accurate, and shareable captions and translations. Its primary value is enabling speakers to reach a multilingual audience simultaneously without pre-recorded content, using the audience's own devices as personal caption displays.

Main Features

1. Real-Time Multilingual Live Captioning: The system transcribes spoken language live with under 2 seconds of latency and can translate the feed into multiple languages concurrently. It works by utilizing dual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) engines for high accuracy, processing audio input in real-time, and streaming the text output to a web-based interface accessible via QR code.
2. QR Code-Based Audience Participation: Instead of displaying captions only on a main screen, the service generates a QR code. Audience members scan it with their smartphones to access a private, real-time caption feed on their own device. This allows for personal language selection (e.g., original audio, Spanish, French) and a clutter-free main presentation screen.
3. Professional-Grade Subtitle & Transcription Engine: Beyond live events, the platform offers a powerful backend for post-production. Features include word-level speaker diarization (separating overlapping voices), millisecond-accurate timecoding, glossary enforcement for brand terms, and export to broadcast-ready formats like SRT, VTT, FCPXML, and burned-in video files up to 4K resolution.
4. Integrated Meeting Notetaker & Interview Analysis: The technology extends to automated meeting transcription for platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, using either a bot or a browser extension. It provides AI-generated summaries, extracts decisions and action items with owners, and offers powerful search and analysis tools for research interviews, identifying key quotes and themes across hours of audio.

Problems Solved

1. Pain Point: Live events and webinars are inaccessible to non-native speakers, the deaf and hard of hearing community, and attendees in noisy environments. Traditional solutions like on-screen captions are often single-language, visually distracting, or prohibitively expensive.
2. Target Audience: Webinar hosts, corporate trainers, university lecturers, conference organizers, podcasters recording live, religious institutions, government agencies holding public forums, and any professional conducting multilingual meetings or user research interviews.
3. Use Cases:
   • A university lecturer delivering a guest lecture to an international student body; students follow along in their native language on their phones.
   • A product launch webinar where the CEO's speech is captioned in real-time in English, Spanish, and Japanese for a global audience.
   • A UX research team analyzing dozens of hour-long interview recordings, using AI to surface all instances where users mentioned a specific "pain point."
   • A video production team needing to quickly generate accurate, glossary-checked subtitles in 10+ languages for a new product marketing video.

Unique Advantages

1. Differentiation: Unlike basic captioning tools or built-in platform captions, Subanana combines broadcast-level accuracy with a unique audience-centric distribution model (QR code/private phone feed). Unlike generic AI translators, it maintains context across an entire transcript, preventing pronoun and entity errors common in line-by-line translation.
2. Key Innovation: The "dual ASR engine" approach per language pair enhances accuracy and reliability. The core innovation is the seamless workflow from live captioning to immediately available, formatted transcripts and subtitles, all within a single platform. The ability to pre-load speaker names and a custom glossary ensures brand and technical terms are correctly captured and translated from the first word.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How accurate are Subanana's live captions? Subanana reports an average word accuracy of 98% across its transcription portfolio, including challenging scenarios with accented speech, technical jargon, and code-switching (mixing languages). Accuracy is bolstered by dual ASR engines and custom glossary support.
2. What languages does Live Captions by Subanana support? The platform supports over 95 languages and variants, including English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many more. Live translation typically features a subset of these, with more available for post-event transcription and subtitling.
3. How does the audience join the live caption feed? The presenter shares a QR code or short link on the main screen. Audience members use their smartphone camera to scan the QR code, which opens a mobile-optimized webpage in their browser. They then select their preferred language and see the captions stream in real-time, synchronized with the speaker.
4. Can I use Subanana for pre-recorded videos and not just live events? Yes. While "Live Captions" is a flagship feature, Subanana's core is a comprehensive AI subtitling and transcription tool. You can upload recorded videos (MP4, MOV, etc.) or audio files to generate transcripts, translate dialogue, and create subtitles in multiple export formats for publishing.
5. Does it work with my existing video conferencing software? Yes. For meeting transcription, Subanana offers a "Notetaker Bot" that can join scheduled meetings on Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Alternatively, a Chrome extension can capture tab audio directly without a bot appearing in the participant list.