LAS VEGAS — It’s an all-in-one Linux or Windows-based product that is designed to improve speed and accuracy for captions and translations on-prem or in the cloud. And, it saw its marketplace debut at the 2024 NAB Show, courtesy of ENCO.
Introducing enCaption Sierra, the next generation of ENCO’s line of products focused on automated conversion and delivery of captions in broadcast and AV environments.
“For the first time, enCaption Sierra brings ENCO’s market-leading automated captioning technology together with an SDI captioning encoder to create an all-in-one solution for on-prem environments and containerized deployment options for cloud,” ENCO notes, adding that the enCaption Sierra can be delivered on Windows or Linux operating systems and is managed and monitored from a web browser.
Furthermore, enCaption Sierra’s GUI features a simple calendar scheduler and various configuration settings, including custom dictionaries, word models, filtering, and bilingual language options.
ENCO adds that enCaption Sierra’s ability to produce and deliver faster and more accurate captions “correlates directly with new parallel processing capabilities powered through a GPU,” as the GPU architecture “delivers unprecedented computational power to ENCO’s AI-based speech-to-text engine.”
The same improvements are present in Sierra’s integrated enTranslate module, which uses machine translation and grammatical structure analysis to deliver captions for up to 37 languages simultaneously. ENCO also adds new languages to enTranslate’s engine on a consistent basis, with three new languages added in time for Sierra’s public debut at NAB Show 2024, including a bilingual language model for Spanish-English content.
ENCO has also sharpened the listenability and responsiveness of the system with the Sierra release, improving performance in challenging audio environments. enCaption Sierra also leverages GPU processing for improved speaker change detection and the ability to recognize music, laughter, applause, and crowd noise. Sierra is an excellent listener and reliably computes fast speech, strong accents and problematic audio quality to consistently deliver clean captions.
“ENCO continues to lead the charge for captioning innovation as it pertains to helping broadcasters and MVPDs produce clean closed captions for their broadcast content with greater efficiency,” ENCO President Ken Frommert said. “The same philosophy applies to open captioning needs in AV environments to help audiences improve comprehension. Sierra also addresses the need for flexible deployment options, offering complete on-prem and cloud options that align with each broadcaster’s operational model with significant performance and cost-reducing benefits. We are excited to unleash the powerful new capabilities of Sierra to those familiar and new to the enCaption universe.”
