Real-Time AI Captioning: Where the Technology Stands Today

Ken Frommert, President of ENCO, shares his perspective ahead of ISE 2026

AI dominates every conversation in Pro AV right now. But according to Ken Frommert, President of ENCO, the more meaningful shift isn't the technology itself—it's how practical it's become.

"What's most exciting is how practical and immediate those applications have become for Pro AV," Frommert told Systems Contractor News ahead of ISE 2026. "The common theme will be AI's ability to remove friction from production while improving accessibility, comprehension, and engagement."

What AI Has Actually Changed in Captioning

A few years ago, automated captioning was a compromise. Today, Frommert argues, the gap has closed significantly.

"Accuracy has improved dramatically, even in challenging acoustic environments, and latency is now low enough to support truly live applications," he said.

Two specific advances stand out in his assessment.

The first is speaker differentiation. "AI-driven voice fingerprinting allows systems to automatically identify and differentiate between speakers within a single audio stream"—a capability that changes how useful captions actually are for multi-speaker content.

The second is contextual awareness. "AI is also far better at recognizing non-verbal elements like music, applause, and laughter, which adds important context for viewers." For accessibility purposes, understanding what's happening, not just what's being said, matters.

Beyond transcription, Frommert points to synthetic speech generation as an emerging capability—"re-speaking content in different voices or languages, or even creating entirely new voices for announcements"—making captioning, subtitling, and translation more adaptable across modern AV installations.

Why Global Perspective Matters for Accessibility

Frommert sees ISE's international scope as directly relevant to accessibility work. "That global scope matters. It drives conversations about multilingual communication, accessibility standards, and deployment models that differ region by region."

For a company building solutions designed for diverse communities and multilingual venues, that international perspective shapes product development in ways a domestic-only market wouldn't.

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