An Automatic Captioning System for Telemedicine

In this paper, we present a first exposition of an automatic closed captioning system designed to assist hearing impaired users in telemedicine. This system automatically separates telehealth conversation speech between a health care provider and a client into two streams and provides real-time captions of health care provider´s speech to client. The captioning system is based on the state-of-the-art technology of large vocabulary conversational speech recognition, encompassing speech stream separation, acoustic modeling, language modeling, real-time decoding, confidence annotation, and human-computer interface, with innovations made in several components. The system currently handles a vocabulary size over 46 K. Real-time captioning performance at the average word accuracy of 77.95% is reported