[PLUG-TALK] Sprint Web Captel

[Keith Lofstrom]

"Captel" is short for Captioned Telephone, a service for the hearing
impaired where a telephone conversation is monitored and converted
to text so the hearing impaired person can read it.  I have hearing
problems, and I fear they will get worse with age, so these services
can be handy.

Sprint is now offering a free web-based service for Captel, at
www.sprintcaptel.com . It claims to work with any modern web browser
and is operating system agnostic.  It is designed for full screens
and not PDA phones, but I imagine it will work with an IPhone and
a bluetooth headset.  Perhaps an IPhone user can try that out, it
would be a good reason to get one!

BTW, the terms of service do not permit usage for other purposes.
No, this is not for doing general speech recognition or for logging
surveilance, and if this is the typical "computer plus live human"
doing the captioning, they will discover misuse quickly.  If it is
computer-only, I imagine there will be low cost commercial options
coming on soon - I would love to see this mashed up with keyboard
capture tools for low cost medical transcription, or with public
key authentication for legal depositions.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs