Captioned Telephone - Part One

Editor: This article is part of our coverage of the 2007 TDI convention and is brought to you by the folks at NVRC. You do not need permission to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC.

Robert Engelke and Pam Holmes were the presenters. This is part one of six parts.

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Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three

Here's Part Four

Here's Part Five

Here's Part Six

Robert Engelke has designed and developed text telephone (TTY) technologies and devices for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. After several years of working in the disabilities field, he founded Ultratec, Inc. in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977. He has been instrumental in bringing new communications technology to deaf and hard of hearing persons, including inventing the first pocket-sized TTY, the first Pay Phone TTY, a large visual display TTY for people who are both deaf and blind, and Voice Carry Over for dual party relay services. He has been awarded more than 25 U.S. patents as well as numerous European and foreign patents.

Pamela Holmes is Director of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and CapTel Customer Service for Ultratec, Inc. where she has worked for the last 20 years. She has served on the TDI Board of Directors and twice co-chaired TDI conference programs. President Bill Clinton appointed her to the U.S. Access Board in 1994; she was reappointed to a second term, during which she served as Chair. She played a lead role in the Board's development of accessibility guidelines for telecommunications equipment (Section 255) and Federal Electronic and Information Technology (Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act as Amended).

Rob Engelke

In the Beginning

We're going to have a little talk today about some of the new things that are happening with captioned telephone. Many of you may already know quite a bit about captioned telephone, but for those of you who don't, there will be a brief review and a quiz.

About 30 years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine, Kevin Colwell, about how we could come up with a way to communicate for people who had severe hearing disabilities, or who perhaps were deaf, without having to use a keyboard. People would just be able to use a telephone in some way that was functionally equivalent to the way that hearing people do. We came up with the idea that basically if the person was able to speak for themselves, that we should be able to find some way, technically, to convert whatever the other person was saying into text, and display that for the person who needed the assistance. We called it the captioned telephone, just like captioned TV.

Looking for Key Pieces

The problem was that the technology that we needed wasn't in existence at that time. And we didn't know how to do it, either. So we messed around with it for a while and did a few things. But unfortunately, a couple of the key pieces were still missing.

We were able to get a telephone that would allow a person to speak to another person, but getting the text back in the opposite direction was a really difficult thing to do. Of course everybody thought that speech recognition would be a great idea, but 25, 30 years ago, that was a dream, it wasn't a reality. We tried lots of other methods, including palentypists, which many people here in the United States would think of as court reporters. We tried people who could really type fast on a regular keyboard. We tried some computer-aided typing programs, and a bunch of other things. But unfortunately, we weren't able to get it to go fast enough and be accurate enough.

The Birth of VCO and Turbo Code

So we took the technology, which allowed voice in one direction and text back, and basically offered it to the relays and they called it VCO, voice carry over. And that's where a person speaks in one direction, but in the other direction the agent or CA hears what's being said and then types it using a traditional keyboard. So VCO was born about 22 years ago. It that was kind of the first thing that came out of the captioned telephone project.

The next thing that came out was what we called Turbo Code, because we recognized that even if someone could type really fast, or if we used a court reporter, that the text could only be sent over what the relays were then using, which was Baudot, at about 60 words a minute. That's much too slow for the real speed of speech. We sped things up a little bit, and took Bob Weitbrecht's original invention of using the Baudot code and a simple SK type modem and we just hot wired it and made it go about two and a half times as fast. That helped a bit.

Finding Fast Speech Transcription

We were getting a little closer to the goal of realtime transcription and being able to do the captioned telephone, but unfortunately we still couldn't convert the speech into text at realtime speeds. Finally some guys out in Massachusetts at MIT formed a little company called Dragon and they came up with a way to do that. They did a pretty good job, but it wasn't until IBM put on about 300 engineers and bought the rights to Dragon's engine that we finally got a product that would allow pretty well-trained people, but not people who had unusual skills, to transcribe speech into realtime using a computer.

As soon as we saw that that could happen, we realized that the captioned telephone project was back on the griddle. We bought several systems and tried them out to make sure that they worked. It was a really fun day. Since then we have gone through a number of other voice recognition systems. Now we are using one that is probably twice the power of the one we originally started out with, and we can teach people to do the task quickly with accurate and speedy results. Now we have the CapTel. The CapTel service originated in about 2002 with the first trials. We began putting the service out there in 2003. Captioned telephone now is doing quite well. It is available in 46 states and a couple more are coming.

Captioned telephone service is a discretionary service. It's not mandated by the FCC. It's sort of a special service that states can decide that they want to put into their portfolio or not. The captioned telephone has proliferated across the country in fair quantity now, and we believe that it will expand with the most recent ruling from the FCC.

Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three

Here's Part Four

Here's Part Five

Here's Part Six