ENCO products enCaption and WebDAD are recipients of the 2020 Future Best of Show Award. Future’s Best of Show Awards are evaluated by a panel of engineers and industry experts, and are selected based on innovation, feature set, cost efficiency and performance in serving the industry. A Special Edition of the award program was held this year in the absence of a physical NAB Show, with entries judged on their written nominations. Learn more about the winning solutions below.
enCaption
Save Money and Improve Efficiency with Live Automated Captioning
Greatly reduce overall costs by automating your captioning workflows with enCaption by ENCO. enCaption is a turn-key solution, available on-premise or in the cloud, for providing around-the-clock generation of captioning of live or recorded programming. The latest version includes a powerful video delay feature that enables lip-sync grade caption synchronization, native caption embedding, enhanced MOS newsroom integration, as well as updates to its punctuation and speaker separation abilities.
enCaption’s latest enhancement helps customers overcome an industry-wide challenge in the captioning of live programming. While captions could be aligned with corresponding speech during post production of file-based content, the nature of live captioning has inherently precluded such precise synchronization. Speech-to-text processing of a word or phrase cannot begin until after it has been spoken, and taking the context of surrounding words into account for greater transcription accuracy adds to this latency. enCaption’s newest capability shatters this limitation, effectively synchronizing the live captions with the spoken words. Already highly regarded for minimizing the latency between speech and its resultant captions, enCaption can now delay the associated video and audio by a user-configurable duration to provide lip-sync-like alignment. Two to four seconds of video delay is generally sufficient to provide the desired temporal precision, but by setting a longer delay, customers can choose to expand the audio analysis window to further enhance enCaption4’s renowned speech-to-text accuracy.
enCaption’s AI-based deep neural network can embed CEA-608/708 captions natively into your transmission signal (or drive 3rd party encoders), and also generates real-time transcripts, making that content accessible on the station's website or smartphone app, for those with hearing difficulties, or for viewers to simply follow along quietly, to your coverage. enCaption’s enhanced MOS newsroom integration can automatically learn correct spellings of unusual words from lists and scripts and does not require the creation of speech pattern profiles for every person speaking. This is an important benefit for news operations automating and captioning speech from various anchors, reporters, meteorologists, and studio guests.
Other revolutionary features include multi-speaker distinction, which can distinguish between multiple people speaking based on separate microphone feeds or audio channels, as well as being able to detect changes between speakers within a single mixed feed. Additional AI-driven enhancements improve the captioning of punctuation and capitalization, among other challenging scenarios.
enCaption continues to be a gamechanger for broadcasters, cable networks and OTT services that crave more efficient and affordable closed captioning workflows. The patented solution continues to deliver industry-leading speed, accuracy and cost-savings for closed captioning. The on-premise or cloud-based solution can address breaking news without the challenge of finding a live captioner, and do so at a much lower cost. enCaption has proven to be not only a technically reliable solution for automated closed captioning, but also a smart business decision for the user from a long-term cost-savings perspective.
WebDAD
Access your Automation System from Any Web-Enabled Device with WebDAD
The ability to work remotely and leverage automated workflows is more important than ever at this moment, and WebDAD mobile automation can help operations to continue unabated. WebDAD is a browser-based remote automation control system, with a virtualized platform that allows users to remotely access and manage studio-based ENCO DAD automation systems. These solutions allow broadcasters to maintain employee health and safety by supporting work-from-home models. It also helps with keeping operating costs low in a very challenging economic environment.
WebDAD empowers cloud-based operation through an updated, HTML5-enabled user interface. Users have the freedom of a fully-virtualized platform to remotely access and control their studio-based ENCO DAD radio automation systems – a benefit made all the more powerful with the addition of ENCO’s Presenter On-Air interface. This interface further optimizes ENCO’s modular, touchscreen design for customizing production workflows and providing instant access to media libraries, playlists and more.
The latest version of WebDAD offers voice tracking enhancements including ENCO’s powerful and efficient FastTRAK one-button voice track creation and insertion feature – previously available in the local DAD interface but appearing in WebDAD for the first time – alongside improved sound quality. Its refined user interface sports responsive adaptation to the operator’s browser window, improving the user experience across desktop and mobile devices alike.
WebDAD has evolved to support a true “Studio in the Cloud” operation that removes the limitation of maintaining an on-premises physical workstation. In addition to reducing operational costs at the station, WebDAD customers have broad control and playout capabilities across on-air presentation, playlist manipulation, voice tracking, and other workflow tasks. With the powerful ENCO Presenter On-Air interface, WebDAD is the most powerful and comprehensive browser-based interface on the market.
WebDAD also helps stations work more freely with on-air and production talent around the world by making it easy to bring in part-time, contract, and remote staff to access the playout system from anywhere there is an internet connection. Advanced security features allow administrator accounts to add or remove access easily, making it easier than ever to work with contract workers, even if they are only needed to cover one event.
