Transcript: In Control Webinar: Live AI Captioning on Events (featuring Orla Pearson)

I think it's a great way to present what we're talking about today. You guys are talking about. Awesome. All right. So have you got good questions for me, Damir? Or are you just going to let me run? So, I will introduce everything, just a few sentences, introduce you. Your questions at the beginning will be basically, why are we talking about? Where are we with that? I think it's like, where is the industry with AI captioning? Because we have Accessibility Act now in power, we need to follow it so it's no longer optional. We need to look into this topic and now just adding another topic on top of it and saying live captioning and then we can start with that. relevance, urgency, what's today, what are the benefits, if just beyond only accessibility, if you just think about for non-native speakers, hybrid audiences, there's a lot of business aspects that are not necessarily just accessible part of that. And also how this European Accessibility Act I think from my point of view, it's like it's here to stay. It will get better. But before it gets better, what do we need to do to comply with the European Accessibility Act? What are the options? What should we be thinking about? It's the beginning of the solution, but it isn't the final solution just yet. Is that OK? Perfect. And the second part will be then to demystify the technology, to say, OK, let's speak a bit about that. And that's the chance where I would say you can also show something. And we discussed those words that you can then translate, glossary, stuff that you showed that was quite, I think, self-explainable and people get what we're talking about in a different way. And there's this hybrid way, but there's AI and there's OMA. So there are two ways to caption and what are the differences and how this play all together is also... how to integrate everything together. And then the next step is, and the last step is how to make it actionable, how to get practical, what are the steps? If you say, okay, I'm planning the event, what should I discuss with producers? That's what you said with vendors. We should talk about how to pick up the right vendor. I think everybody with AI, there isn't a public solution for events, is there? Like there shouldn't be almost because it's not built for this. We have to look for professional solutions with AI. You know, Google and Microsoft, they just produce the engine and that's it. We need to be able to manipulate those engines at events to get our things. So I'll be talking about that. That's okay. Just stop me if I'm talking too much. I'll just look from time to time, well, at our timing. But other than that, the stage is yours. You are the expert on this. Just keep prompting me with questions. And if I go on... Supporting you with questions. Yeah, that's what it should be, really. By the way, I suppose we're all meeting up in London next week at ETL. Orla, you're going to be there? We're not exhibiting, but I'm coming on the road. I would like to meet you in person. I thought we couldn't do everything this year. You know, it's expensive to do these things. We're self-funded. We're not, we don't have outside investment. It's all us from the start. It's nearly killed me, but hopefully this will help too. So yeah, it's, um, it's very, um, it's a very good one. We did really well there, particularly the first year. Um, because we won a lot of awards. We were the nutrients on the block was a few years ago. Accessibility was quite new. I think the second year, not so much, but I think this year looks really good. It looks really good this year. We've concentrated on complex because we have a partnership deal with them, so we get the stuff and we give them stuff. ETL tends to have five-year deals with people, so it's very hard to they they don't move on the price of the stands so yeah it's also an issue we tried different uh things with them and it was not very successful no no they um lord if you want to be seen you are there you use this but it's very hard to say how much it really we really matter we didn't see enough we didn't see enough in sales from it and we didn't see an this was the previous years um we didn't see enough relevance people is what i would say for us for our product um but i think this year it feels like they've done more they've done more this year to do that and i'm a bit sad that we're not going to be there but i'm going to go and walk around and say hi to everybody which everyone else seems to do and do business without getting a stand Compacts are much better at that. You let them know they'll kick people out and stuff. They will. So we had a big captioning company doing that. A week after next, we will be in Barcelona also for the IPTM. Brilliant. I'm quite curious to see how this looks like. Does it make more sense or less or whatever? Yeah. That's a lot of venues. It's a lot of venues. We haven't got a stand there, but I was asked to speak about event accessibility there two years, last year, actually. So that was good. But I think I got more from that. I think when you speak at the events, you get a lot more, a lot more. So I'm always looking for, I'll give you captions if you give me a speaking slot, that kind of thing. I think that's, and then if you have a stand and you've done a talk, people come to your stand. So you drive And I think that's really useful as well. We hear that often as well. Yeah. It's the right combo. In a Ventec Live, it's very hard to get a slot to speak. So you can always ask. They want something from you. Even Comfex are selling panels now, so you can buy a panel. Yeah. They're also spamming me with requests. Yeah. We wanted to do the Accessible Events Show. Please do mention that as well. We wanted to do that differently. We wanted to build the panels ourselves and actually put experts on it. Look, we just about broke even, but so what? We weren't in it to make money. We wanted to do something for the industry. But I'm sure if we did it again, we might want to make money for next year. But again, it's more of a service to the industry. I'm trying to find out which of the shows is really relevant and it's meaningful. I was at IMAX in Frankfurt as well. For us, the company is not relevant at all. Exhibiting there does not bring any value. The right customers are somewhere else. And my issue also at ETL, most of the persons are not with the project there. They just don't really want to discuss anything in detail. They just want to spend some time seeing what's happening. The whole discussions are not really detailed or with me. It's more like, oh. Excite me of this something. I'm not convinced these shows are worth it. I'm not convinced yet. And we've been doing them for a few years. We're going to do a deal hopefully next year with Complex that says we'll put captions on all their events and we'll get free to that. And then I might see something. There is definitely the networking, people getting to know you and that. But I don't know. still to be decided i can see it's so funny i can see myself over here and over here so you'll kick us out now i will kick everybody out and then i i will let the pre-roll and uh once i i'm gonna like put you both on stage at the same time so uh once you once you see yourself here it's like you know it's it's it's you can start your thing all right Have fun and see you. See you in one minute. do do Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. do do Thank you. Thank you. Bye. finally it took a bit of time i'm very sorry about that for this short delay but those are the moments where we see how important technology is so welcome everyone to today's webinar on live ai captioning for events i'm damir from run events and i'm thrilled to have you with us for this important and practical conversation about how accessibility and ai are pre-shaping event experiences. With the European Accessibility Act now coming into effect and technology rapidly evolving, captioning is no longer a niche tool. It's becoming a part of how we design inclusive and modern events. To explore this topic, I'm so lucky to be joined by someone who has lived and shaped the evolution of captioning from courtrooms to the BBC and now on the event stage. Welcome, Orla Pierson. Orla is co-founder of MyClearText and AccessLoop. She trained as stenographer in Dublin, spent over fifteen years working at BBC as a live broadcast captioner, and today leads to innovative companies making events more inclusive and accessible. And I know what I'm talking about because it's not my first time challenging Olra. our first big challenge on stage in London, an attendable event show that we both supported and we discussed in a panel discussion how to pick up the right supplier. It was a really interesting conversation, but what I was missing and I want to really answer today, a relevant and very urgent topic, is for many event planners, captioning still feels a bit optional. Why should people start thinking about that a lot? Hello, everybody, and thank you for that lovely introduction. And it's great to be here to talk about my favorite subject in the whole world. As you know, this has been my whole career, live captioning. I would probably call myself an expert on that as well. Why should we not be looking at live captioning as optional? Well, there's a number of reasons. The main one you mentioned is the EAA, the European Accessibility Act. It's not optional. It's standardized. It's expected. It's one of the things you have to do to comply with the European Accessibility Act. which so few people are aware. I've had so many clients come to me and say, what does this mean for us all? And I'm like, well, if you don't have live captions, you're not complying. And if you don't comply and someone isn't happy, there are fines involved and there are every country has their own set of, um, fines and punishments for not being accessible. And in Ireland, it's a prison term if it's really bad. So it's definitely something we should be taking seriously. That's the legal reasons why we should be adding live captioning as standard. The humanitarian reasons and the do the right thing reasons are many fold. I'll talk about UK statistics. Obviously, each European country is different. But in the UK, there are eighteen million people who have hearing loss, deafness, and tinnitus, and that's an awful lot of people. That's one in five people. So these people are attending your events and will need some support. People, the neurodiversity figures in the UK are at fourteen percent now. Most people feel that's very, very low for the explosion in awareness that we have now around neurodiversity. And people who have neurodiversity are now starting to request captions and feel confident to say, this really helps me. The advice from the government in the UK is for children who are neurodiverse to watch television with live captioning or captioning because it helps aid their learning and engagement with television and subjects. So there is also the population who are over fifty. Everyone who is over fifty is Their hearing is reducing. A lot of my friends I've noticed are saying, what? So I see it in real time, Damir and myself. So yeah, this is real. And then we have people with English as a second language. In the UK, I think it's about eight or nine percent. So that is a huge amount of people. We could be looking at fifty percent of our delegates all benefiting from live captioning. It's kind of a no brainer for me. It's like, why aren't you doing it? Why isn't it standard? Why is it an option? It's that hidden audience and don't wait for it to be requested. I've given you every reason not to wait for it to be requested. You mentioned a really very important topic that the European Union has an Accessibility Act and it's a law. So in the past, we were talking about benefits, but there was no pressure actually to do something. Now there's a legal pressure to do something. And on the other side, It's a very interesting anecdote. I was looking into different countries. In Germany, my wife is French. actually multilingual family that watch different movies in different languages. And I noticed that comparing to French cinema, synchronization, dubbing in Germany is way better. It's just French do not care that much. It's okay, but it could be really good. And I was really interested why is that and so i looked into it and basically what happened in germany every small piece of germany has own dialect and dialects are really strong so to push children with proper accent and proper language they decided to synchronize properly and the same happened in italy as well so before germans and italians wanted to have a language that everyone understands rather than clear language or whatever but just it's very practical and those um to be honest still today if you have someone from very south of germany someone from very north they have difficulties there are a lot of jokes about that so synchronization solved an issue and what i see today that captioning is solving stuff that is beyond only accessible part. Like you said, I also had those numbers back in London, four hundred fifty million people live in the European Union, eighty seven million are having some sort of disability. This is not a small number of people. No, this is a huge, and this is a huge, for me, it's a huge market, right? It's a market for people who are running events. If no one else is making an event accessible, and you are, You now have the edge, right? There is a business case for this. And you should be shouting about it. You should be doing it as best you can, like you're doing everything else with your events. And you should be making it part of your events, not adding it on because somebody might have said they wanted something. And it's a better event experience for everybody when it's accessible. And having captions there, I've never heard anyone complain, put it that way. Well, you can argue that with economical challenges we have today, that perhaps traveling is less and international meetings are less, but at the same time, video calls are becoming even more important as we use it more and more. And if you think about events, we're also moving very strongly into a hybrid world where you have physical events, but they're also followed online. And when they're followed online, you automatically have hybrid audiences, means people all around the world, different languages, different cultural aspects. And let's see in this case, this, what we speak about is pure business opportunity. There's no longer... One hundred percent a business opportunity. And people come to it like, oh, I don't want to do it. It's a bit expensive. And I'm like, cut around a drink set. You paid for it, right? Cut one set of flowers out. You've probably paid for your captions. You know, there are places that you can pull from that budget. And I would always say get your budget for accessibility in place at the start. because it's going to appear in all the other budgets. Each of the budgets should have something for accessibility in it because each part of the event needs accessibility. So everyone for every part of your event should have that, including live captions, for sure. I mean, I think the attitude towards events and people asking for adjustments like live captioning, we ask people for dietary requirements, don't we, at events? But if we don't get any requests, do we not put out vegan food? Do we not put out vegetarian food? Of course we do. Why? Because we know that seventeen percent of people are vegetarian. Seven percent are vegan. So we're anticipating them attending. Why are we not doing that with accessibility? And the figures are much higher. That's always my very common sense. I think I share this anecdote. This was one of my defining moments. I was giving a speech at a corporate event and I put a lot of effort into what I was doing there and they didn't tell me that they invited a deaf person and there was no subtitles, there was nothing. And I was speaking and I would notice at some time that the person is kind of bored. I didn't know why, but normally people are not, at least not bored at my presentations. I don't know if they're successful or not, but people seem to enjoy it and it was like, And then I asked and he thought he would really appreciate at least, well, transcript or whatever. And the first reaction of the people was not, oh my God, so stupid, we should do something. The first reaction was why we invited him. It's like... That's right. And I thought, well, now even technology forces us to think these stupid things. That was the defining moment for me where I personally, as many years ago, it was also not that technologically simple back in days. It was real enough. I know back in days, twenty years ago, that Siemens paid us for consulting because they valued how good internal systems are and how accessible they are when we improved the department got more money. So there was a real competition. Twenty years ago, it was a big deal. But today, it isn't. So let us dig a bit behind the scenes, because finally we have someone who can take us on this journey. Is it complicated? I don't think so. I've spent fifteen years running a company that provides live captioning, initially only human captioning and now both human and AI captioning. And I've also built a platform to deliver live captioning to hybrid events, both AI and human, to online virtual streamed events or in-room events or something that's hybrid. And no, I think we've made it as simple as possible. And there is really no excuse. My mission is always to make it as easy as possible, to give the right education and argument, and to do it at the right price within people's budgets. So there is no excuse for me, as far as I'm concerned, that you can't do it. AI captioning is very, very reasonably priced, although I have seen a couple of providers up their prices, which is interesting. We have tried to keep it really, really reasonable for people. because I would rather they did it than not. I think that AI captioning is probably okay. I don't think it's fantastic. I think it's okay, but it's definitely in the events industry now and it's here to stay. So I think if you want to use AI captioning, you have to think about how can I help it be the best it can be. And when we were doing our platform, Damir, we were talking about suppliers. So I think the first step if you want to start captioning your events, is go and find an expert supplier. I mean, obviously, I would consider myself one of those, but there are a number of others out there. A lot of audiovisual companies, production companies, events companies, they will go to their technical team and say, hey, we need captioning, and the technical team will go, here's a technical solution for this. There you go. But there's no expertise being brought in there. It's just a technical solution to a non-technical problem. That's a super cool topic, because I was yesterday watching, I have to admit, I watched the morning show, I don't know if you know, it's a very fun American series, and the new season is about AI. There's a lot of AI in and they create AI. I shouldn't spoil it, but they create something that's really amazing. It could replace and use completely. AI produce everything from real people. And in the series, you see how it goes amazingly well, but then also not. and there's this negative side where things go really wrong in the very worst moment you can think of and it's everything so horrible obviously this is the series but this is the big question uh with ai with the progress of ai why should we still have humans on board well you're asking the right person and so i have studied ai captioning and i've studied captioning all my life i i know what's hard for a human and interestingly probably fifty percent of what's hard for a human captioner is really hard for AI as well. There are some things that are easy for humans that's hard for AI and vice versa. But AI wasn't built for events of live captioning with people watching it in the moment. AI captioning was not built for that. It was built for universities, dictation, doctors, legal, all of those human typing jobs. It made it You didn't need somebody to type. You could just speak into it. So that's what it was built for, but we're using it as always with AI in completely different ways. And I don't think it's a hundred percent where it's not even, I'd say it's about eighty percent there. When should you use humans? When you have a really, really important subject that you want to, or topic that you want to talk to people, you want them to understand and you want them to feel engaged. If your CEO is giving is all hands to twelve thousand of the companies to announce either profits or losses you should be using humans because that's information that you need to get right okay it needs to be exactly right um i don't think ai is fantastic at accents it is fantastic at some accents and ai is also probably not so good with women with accents it seems much better with deeper voices, not so much with higher voices, which we women have. Numbers, so financial reporting, it mixes up how the numbers are supposed to go together. And also scientific, lots of medical and scientific, it doesn't really do so well. So I would recommend people use humans for all of that. And again, if you really, really want to get that across. But AI is a fantastic solution if you have a broad scale event that is not very technical, that is just talking to people about various things. I think it's fantastic. It can be fantastic because it isn't as expensive as humans and it's a lot easier to set up and you can do it at scale. So if you do, if you have six breakouts, to do that with humans, you could never afford that. But I think a mix of the two is the way forward. And that's something I've created within our platform is the ability to target humans on this and then AI takes over, humans take over, all of that kind of thing. But there's this, I was just, when you were speaking about that, I was thinking about one of our last discussions and I was in London and giving a speech as another conference. And there was Bob Geldof as a keynote speaker on stage. First sentence was okay for UK. I wouldn't say that it's okay for US. It had a lot of efforts in it and it was super fun. It was really cool. but we are a bit more liberal in this case. Well, I'm coming from Germany and we are kind of sensitive to a lot of words as well. You shouldn't be saying this on stage. You can't prevent someone saying something on stage on events, things happen. but you can do something about mispronunciation and perhaps also changing when you see that something was said that you're at least in live transcript is a bit different and what was actually meant. How do you do it? So we've had AccessLoop and that's the platform I've developed. We've created something to really help the AI along. Are you okay if I share my screen? Please. Okay, let me share my screen. Let's hope the technology works, right? Can we see my screen? There we go. So this is Access Loop. I've set up this lovely event for streaming. You add in your streaming details there. you can put in there. There's the captioning. This is for the human captioner. This is the test feature, which is the glossaries feature. I'm just going to add one of these glossaries. You just name your glossaries. I'll set that glossary in. I think I've got some bits in that. You can add any previous ones. I've added lots of words here that I want the AI to look at and go, okay, that's how it When AI understands this, then it should be transcribed differently. Yes, it will transcribe it. I will tell AI what to do, and it needs to be told what to do. I think that's quite important. It will just do what it's told to do, which is translate every word spoken as it sees fit. We're saying, hang on a minute, do it like this. This is a fantastic function, and I don't think any other platform's got it. if you know that the AI is struggling with something, I think, you know, that you know, you can put this in prior to your event, what the word is that the AI, maybe it just goes a lower case on something so candidly. And we wanted to say, go on. I assume the challenge is when you have a multilingual environment, when you say, okay, you have different languages, you want a live transcription, and how many languages are kind of supported? There's over a hundred languages supported on this. This event, this platform will take in one stream of a source language. Let's say it's English and you can send that out to a hundred different languages and you can get a page with a dropdown menu that will display those hundred languages. And you just click on the language you want and the text will appear. This is fantastic because I think we were talking about, you know, an event that I did, which was a mobile phone company. And the product was called Reno, R-E-N-O. And it just kept, the AI would not listen. It kept saying, Reynolds, which is a car, not a phone. So we would just say now, now we would say Reno or we would say Reynolds. So find Reynolds. I'm sorry. And then we would say, replace it with Reno. And then every time that happened, it would immediately replace And you can do on AccessLoop, which is nice, if it's live and you've seen it and your client is screaming, you can do it live and the results are straight away. So before you would have had to take the captions off or get into a lot of trouble. Now there is a save in there. We also have this for the multi-languages. So we have a client who has a product called Dove and it's a shampoo. And that was coming out as Bird of Peace. It was coming out as white bird, and every language had a different translation for dove. That's not ideal because it's a brand name. So we would put in here, do not translate dove. When you see dove, don't translate it. And then it would appear as that in a hundred different languages, just like that. And you can decide whether it's case sensitive or not. And there's also, you were talking about swearing earlier. We have a profanity filter that you can turn that off and you can set that in every language as well. So you can put in those swear words. And it will... A lot of beeps in your transcription. It puts in different characters to save our blushes. In Ireland, they never put it on because it's definitely part of our language. It's part of my cultural language. So this is what we're doing to help that AI and making sure the audio is in really good quality. It's not audio from the room. It's always audio from the sound desk. You have to really understand what it is that you're trying to do and how to get the best out of it. Definitely. And the whole... setup seems quite simple. If we look into it, it's event planner saying, Okay, I have one, one day event, for example, seven hours of content, I have every half an hour, I get in a ten, fifteen sessions, how difficult and how time intensive is to get it going? Again, with Access Leap, it's really easy. We just set up those ten, fifteen events. We press go. We hook the sound in. If you have glossaries for us, we can add those. And then we just off it goes we did five events this morning um with with no trouble and it's it's really simple we i've tried to make it as simple as possible i really have because um while my clear text is using access every single day it's also available to the public so you can just sign up create an account and there is pay and play so you don't have to pay a monthly fee, you don't have to fill in a big registration form, you can sign up and within five minutes you could be sending captions out either to the room that you wanted to go to or to a live stream or to multiple rooms and multiple live streams. Yes, there's no excuses anymore. Now that AccessLoop exists, no special software, no special hardware, nothing. When I have you here, I just got a question. I was just reading it. I made a mistake earlier this year. It was a life-changing mistake, but I gave a keynote about my mistakes. I was speaking about mistakes. If you only hear about success, you get motivated. But how to replicate success is very difficult. There's so much parameters. But from mistakes, you learn everything. This platform is thirty years worth of learning. And we spoke in London about picking up the right supplies. But what are the common mistakes planners do when they think now captioning or I need to work with someone for video? Perhaps I should just take my iPhone and what do you say? What are the common mistakes or say some hints? Think what people should think when they're starting with live streaming and captioning? I think do your research, okay, take some time, do the research, look up the main companies And then have a set of questions, okay? You know, what's the setup? How do you make the captions as good as possible? What about the names of everybody I work with? What about our brand names? You ask those questions. And if the company cannot answer that, then I would move on. If the company doesn't understand themselves what it is they're trying to deliver, then I would say steer clear. I think steer clear of anyone who doesn't, when they speak to you, ask you questions about your event and ask you, you know, one of the first questions when people come to me, I just say, what are you trying to achieve? Do you have people coming who need the service? Is it a tick box? It's OK if it is. It's fine. Is it because you've been asked to do it? Is it last minute? Is it because you have a budget set aside? And then I can approach you with the offers that I think might be most suitable for you. One of our biggest offers at the moment that people really seem to love is they come and say, oh, I've only got a few hundred pounds. It's an all day event. And we go through the agenda with them and we say, what's the most important thing on this agenda? And they'll say, oh, that keynote. And we say, well, how about we use humans on that? And we say, what else is important? And we make sure we fit their budget. But what they're getting is the most accurate captions for their budget, rather than them coming to me, someone else, and someone else saying, what's your budget? Yeah, we can do AI captions for that. We're getting you the best we can for your budget. And AccessLoop absolutely allows us to do that. as a captioning company. I mean, I've built it and developed it, but I'm really seeing the power in it now as a captioning company using it and bringing it into our whole workflow. It's been incredible. And it's very hard to set up on your own and self fund and do all these things. But I really feel that there are two years of expertise that I have needs to be put into a platform because I see a lot of platforms where they just don't understand what it is they're trying to do. They have great developers, they have a great idea, but that little kinds of nuance and those little things that matter, like in the glossaries, they just have one thing you added up. They don't think about what happens after, when it goes wrong in their lives, what can we do? So I'm building solutions for events because I'm doing events every single day. That's my job. My job is to deliver accessibility to events. So I've built something that will do that. I always try to take some notes and I kind of think with mental notes and say, what is my takeaway? But my takeaway from everything we discussed is that if you do it properly, it is not that complicated. It's also not that time intensive. But if you don't, it could become a major headache. And with today's solution and technologies, we shouldn't go the easy way just because of whatever. Because as I said, the proper way is already here. And I'm quite amazed with everything what is happening right now. But as you see, I'm strategic event ninja. So I always think it is. a few steps ahead, or at least I try. I see a lot of videos now, they are not synchronized anymore because they are even lip-synced. So you have a perfect augmentation. So a person is even using their own voice with AI kind of fitted into like, I'm sounding like me in English, but my accent is way better. And this is what happens in video. There's a big discussion around that. Does it make sense? Should we... just lose or what makes us interesting and unique, just having those perfect AI avatars running around. But this is one direction. The other direction, obviously, I see live captioning becoming absolute mainstream, changing from you should have it or why is it not available? But do you see how it will evolve in the next time? Yeah, I think it will become mainstream. I think, you know, like I say, fifteen years ago when I started my company, I had to do a much harder sell. And it was people who understood and knew and had a strategy around making things accessible that were, or people were requesting. We did a lot of work there. Now, it's not about requests. It's just about, we need captioning. But I think people are too quick to see it as this AI, as this quick, easy solution, cheap, boom. And I said to you before, we need to be really careful about our attitudes toward accessibility. What other part of your event do you have the attitude of, great, there's an app. Let's get it in. Boom, I'm done. We don't have that attitude. We spend hours pouring across the registration, the look of the show, the slides, the atmosphere, the goodie bags. So much thought goes into that, so much planning, so much budget. Anything to do with accessibility needs exactly the same type of thinking, budget, and approach. So I think AI captioning is a fantastic addition, but it hasn't solved the problem. It's part of the solution. And working with suppliers like me and other suppliers, referenceable suppliers, you can have that solution, but you can have it at its best. And I think that's what we should be giving our delegates, our audiences, people coming to our events who are taking time out of their day. And I think this next generation has an expectation around accessibility, inclusion, diversity. And if they're in an event and they're not seeing that at quality, that will affect your brand. That will affect your audience, everything. And do it right. Everybody's happy. Your brand looks good. Fantastic. You know, do it badly. What does that say about you as a brand that you don't value people who need live captioning or other adjustments? That's what you're saying when you put up something that's not the best it can be. That's my final statement, Demir. There's always more to say. This was inspiring and full of practical advice. Thank you for sharing your expertise. And to our audience, as you heard, accessibility isn't just compliance. It's audience care, it's inclusion, it's brand reputation. And live captioning is one of the simplest ways to make your events more inclusive and future ready. You will hear more about this at InControl Summit. Not the time to speak about this right now because we ran out of time already. Exactly. To hear more, and we both will be speaking at InControl Summit. We will post a few links after. But thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And looking forward to our next meeting. Me too. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Yeah. Whoops. Yeah, I've got you. Okay, so we should have the, we should have, let me just change this. I still have to go live from the LinkedIn. Okay, nice. Cool. Yeah, okay, so I can see the captions as well on the bottom there. Yeah, this works. Awesome. We've got them overlaid. Is that okay? Yeah. Good. Yeah, they're coming through. Can you see them on LinkedIn? Yep, yep. There's a little bit of delay on LinkedIn, but that's fine. That's great. I mean, like a few seconds. Yeah, but that's the delay from us to LinkedIn. There's always five. It's live, but there's about five seconds. yeah yeah that's great okay cool so now when we're ready i will just go uh live from from yeah from linkedin and then you guys can start but i what i like to do is just to make sure that everything runs smooth i i'd like to like disappear from the screen and just put on some music and just the banner image for like a minute or two before or not so people can kind of join the lobby Tell me when you're doing that and then I'll clear the captions because it won't pick up the music. So it will just be a blank. I don't think you have to really do anything. I will just do it in stream. Everything is going to be in mute. There's going to be some music and just a screen. So once I remove that, I will remove that and just put you guys on stage and then you can take it from there. So it's pretty. I think that's it. Okay. So what I've done is there's a link I'm going to put in here. that's the text page and it's got german captions on it as well it's very long we're working on that so if you click on that and then open the um german it will be there okay i will i will share that in the chat on linkedin then that's more german version they can watch there You don't have to. I mean, it's up to you. I will do that. I think it's a great way to present what we're talking about today. You guys are talking about. Awesome. All right. So have you got good questions for me, Damir? Or are you just going to let me run? So, I will introduce everything, just a few sentences, introduce you. Your questions at the beginning will be basically, why are we talking about? Where are we with that? I think it's like, where is the industry with AI captioning? Because we have Accessibility Act now in power, we need to follow it so it's no longer optional. We need to look into this topic and now just adding another topic on top of it and saying live captioning and then we can start with that. relevance, urgency, what's today, what are the benefits, if just beyond only accessibility, if you just think about for non-native speakers, hybrid audiences, there's a lot of business aspects that are not necessarily just accessible part of that. And also how this European Accessibility Act I think from my point of view, it's like it's here to stay. It will get better. But before it gets better, what do we need to do to comply with the European Accessibility Act? What are the options? What should we be thinking about? It's the beginning of the solution, but it isn't the final solution just yet. Is that OK? Perfect. And the second part will be then to demystify the technology, to say, OK, let's speak a bit about that. And that's the chance where I would say you can also show something. And we discussed those words that you can then translate, glossary, stuff that you showed that was quite, I think, self-explainable and people get what we're talking about in a different way. And there's this hybrid way, but there's AI and there's OMA. So there are two ways to caption and what are the differences and how this play all together is also... how to integrate everything together. And then the next step is, and the last step is how to make it actionable, how to get practical, what are the steps? If you say, okay, I'm planning the event, what should I discuss with producers? That's what you said with vendors. We should talk about how to pick up the right vendor. I think everybody with AI, there isn't a public solution for events, is there? Like there shouldn't be almost because it's not built for this. We have to look for professional solutions with AI. You know, Google and Microsoft, they just produce the engine and that's it. We need to be able to manipulate those engines at events to get our things. So I'll be talking about that. That's okay. Just stop me if I'm talking too much. I'll just look from time to time, well, at our timing. But other than that, the stage is yours. You are the expert on this. Just keep prompting me with questions. And if I go on... Supporting you with questions. Yeah, that's what it should be, really. By the way, I suppose we're all meeting up in London next week at ETL. Orla, you're going to be there? We're not exhibiting, but I'm coming on the road. I would like to meet you in person. I thought we couldn't do everything this year. You know, it's expensive to do these things. We're self-funded. We're not, we don't have outside investment. It's all us from the start. It's nearly killed me, but hopefully this will help too. So yeah, it's, um, it's very, um, it's a very good one. We did really well there, particularly the first year. Um, because we won a lot of awards. We were the nutrients on the block was a few years ago. Accessibility was quite new. I think the second year, not so much, but I think this year looks really good. It looks really good this year. We've concentrated on complex because we have a partnership deal with them, so we get the stuff and we give them stuff. ETL tends to have five-year deals with people, so it's very hard to they they don't move on the price of the stands so yeah it's also an issue we tried different uh things with them and it was not very successful no no they um lord if you want to be seen you are there you use this but it's very hard to say how much it really we really matter we didn't see enough we didn't see enough in sales from it and we didn't see an this was the previous years um we didn't see enough relevance people is what i would say for us for our product um but i think this year it feels like they've done more they've done more this year to do that and i'm a bit sad that we're not going to be there but i'm going to go and walk around and say hi to everybody which everyone else seems to do and do business without getting a stand Compacts are much better at that. You let them know they'll kick people out and stuff. They will. So we had a big captioning company doing that. A week after next, we will be in Barcelona also for the IPTM. Brilliant. I'm quite curious to see how this looks like. Does it make more sense or less or whatever? Yeah. That's a lot of venues. It's a lot of venues. We haven't got a stand there, but I was asked to speak about event accessibility there two years, last year, actually. So that was good. But I think I got more from that. I think when you speak at the events, you get a lot more, a lot more. So I'm always looking for, I'll give you captions if you give me a speaking slot, that kind of thing. I think that's, and then if you have a stand and you've done a talk, people come to your stand. So you drive And I think that's really useful as well. We hear that often as well. Yeah. It's the right combo. In a Ventec Live, it's very hard to get a slot to speak. So you can always ask. They want something from you. Even Comfex are selling panels now, so you can buy a panel. Yeah. They're also spamming me with requests. Yeah. We wanted to do the Accessible Events Show. Please do mention that as well. We wanted to do that differently. We wanted to build the panels ourselves and actually put experts on it. Look, we just about broke even, but so what? We weren't in it to make money. We wanted to do something for the industry. But I'm sure if we did it again, we might want to make money for next year. But again, it's more of a service to the industry. I'm trying to find out which of the shows is really relevant and it's meaningful. I was at IMAX in Frankfurt as well. For us, the company is not relevant at all. Exhibiting there does not bring any value. The right customers are somewhere else. And my issue also at ETL, most of the persons are not with the project there. They just don't really want to discuss anything in detail. They just want to spend some time seeing what's happening. The whole discussions are not really detailed or with me. It's more like, oh. Excite me of this something. I'm not convinced these shows are worth it. I'm not convinced yet. And we've been doing them for a few years. We're going to do a deal hopefully next year with Complex that says we'll put captions on all their events and we'll get free to that. And then I might see something. There is definitely the networking, people getting to know you and that. But I don't know. still to be decided i can see it's so funny i can see myself over here and over here so you'll kick us out now i will kick everybody out and then i i will let the pre-roll and uh once i i'm gonna like put you both on stage at the same time so uh once you once you see yourself here it's like you know it's it's it's you can start your thing all right Have fun and see you. See you in one minute. do do Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. do do Thank you. Thank you. Bye. finally it took a bit of time i'm very sorry about that for this short delay but those are the moments where we see how important technology is so welcome everyone to today's webinar on live ai captioning for events i'm damir from run events and i'm thrilled to have you with us for this important and practical conversation about how accessibility and ai are pre-shaping event experiences. With the European Accessibility Act now coming into effect and technology rapidly evolving, captioning is no longer a niche tool. It's becoming a part of how we design inclusive and modern events. To explore this topic, I'm so lucky to be joined by someone who has lived and shaped the evolution of captioning from courtrooms to the BBC and now on the event stage. Welcome, Orla Pierson. Orla is co-founder of MyClearText and AccessLoop. She trained as stenographer in Dublin, spent over fifteen years working at BBC as a live broadcast captioner, and today leads to innovative companies making events more inclusive and accessible. And I know what I'm talking about because it's not my first time challenging Orla. our first big challenge on stage in London, an attendable event show that we both supported and we discussed in a panel discussion how to pick up the right supplier. It was a really interesting conversation, but what I was missing and I want to really answer today, a relevant and very urgent topic, is for many event planners, captioning still feels a bit optional. Why should people start thinking about that a lot? Hello, everybody, and thank you for that lovely introduction. And it's great to be here to talk about my favorite subject in the whole world. As you know, this has been my whole career, live captioning. I would probably call myself an expert on that as well. Why should we not be looking at live captioning as optional? Well, there's a number of reasons. The main one you mentioned is the EAA, the European Accessibility Act. It's not optional. It's standardized. It's expected. It's one of the things you have to do to comply with the European Accessibility Act. which so few people are aware. I've had so many clients come to me and say, what does this mean for us all? And I'm like, well, if you don't have live captions, you're not complying. And if you don't comply and someone isn't happy, there are fines involved and there are every country has their own set of, um, fines and punishments for not being accessible. And in Ireland, it's a prison term if it's really bad. So it's definitely something we should be taking seriously. That's the legal reasons why we should be adding live captioning as standard. The humanitarian reasons and the do the right thing reasons are many fold. I'll talk about UK statistics. Obviously, each European country is different. But in the UK, there are eighteen million people who have hearing loss, deafness, and tinnitus, and that's an awful lot of people. That's one in five people. So these people are attending your events and will need some support. People, the neurodiversity figures in the UK are at fourteen percent now. Most people feel that's very, very low for the explosion in awareness that we have now around neurodiversity. And people who have neurodiversity are now starting to request captions and feel confident to say, this really helps me. The advice from the government in the UK is for children who are neurodiverse to watch television with live captioning or captioning because it helps aid their learning and engagement with television and subjects. So there is also the population who are over fifty. Everyone who is over fifty is Their hearing is reducing. A lot of my friends I've noticed are saying, what? So I see it in real time, Damir and myself. So yeah, this is real. And then we have people with English as a second language. In the UK, I think it's about eight or nine percent. So that is a huge amount of people. We could be looking at fifty percent of our delegates all benefiting from live captioning. It's kind of a no brainer for me. It's like, why aren't you doing it? Why isn't it standard? Why is it an option? It's that hidden audience and don't wait for it to be requested. I've given you every reason not to wait for it to be requested. You mentioned a really very important topic that the European Union has an Accessibility Act and it's a law. So in the past, we were talking about benefits, but there was no pressure actually to do something. Now there's a legal pressure to do something. And on the other side, It's a very interesting anecdote. I was looking into different countries. In Germany, my wife is French. actually multilingual family that watch different movies in different languages. And I noticed that comparing to French cinema, synchronization, dubbing in Germany is way better. It's just French do not care that much. It's okay, but it could be really good. And I was really interested why is that and so i looked into it and basically what happened in germany every small piece of germany has own dialect and dialects are really strong so to push children with proper accent and proper language they decided to synchronize properly and the same happened in italy as well so before germans and italians wanted to have a language that everyone understands rather than clear language or whatever but just it's very practical and those um to be honest still today if you have someone from very south of germany someone from very north they have difficulties there are a lot of jokes about that so synchronization solved an issue and what i see today that captioning is solving stuff that is beyond only accessible part. Like you said, I also had those numbers back in London, four hundred fifty million people live in the European Union, eighty seven million are having some sort of disability. This is not a small number of people. No, this is a huge, and this is a huge, for me, it's a huge market, right? It's a market for people who are running events. If no one else is making an event accessible, and you are, You now have the edge, right? There is a business case for this. And you should be shouting about it. You should be doing it as best you can, like you're doing everything else with your events. And you should be making it part of your events, not adding it on because somebody might have said they wanted something. And it's a better event experience for everybody when it's accessible. And having captions there, I've never heard anyone complain, put it that way. Well, you can argue that with economical challenges we have today, that perhaps traveling is less and international meetings are less, but at the same time, video calls are becoming even more important as we use it more and more. And if you think about events, we're also moving very strongly into a hybrid world where you have physical events, but they're also followed online. And when they're followed online, you automatically have hybrid audiences, means people all around the world, different languages, different cultural aspects. And let's see in this case, this, what we speak about is pure business opportunity. There's no longer... One hundred percent a business opportunity. And people come to it like, oh, I don't want to do it. It's a bit expensive. And I'm like, cut around a drink set. You paid for it, right? Cut one set of flowers out. You've probably paid for your captions. You know, there are places that you can pull from that budget. And I would always say get your budget for accessibility in place at the start. because it's going to appear in all the other budgets. Each of the budgets should have something for accessibility in it because each part of the event needs accessibility. So everyone for every part of your event should have that, including live captions, for sure. I mean, I think the attitude towards events and people asking for adjustments like live captioning, we ask people for dietary requirements, don't we, at events? But if we don't get any requests, do we not put out vegan food? Do we not put out vegetarian food? Of course we do. Why? Because we know that seventeen percent of people are vegetarian. Seven percent are vegan. So we're anticipating them attending. Why are we not doing that with accessibility? And the figures are much higher. That's always my very common sense. I think I share this anecdote. This was one of my defining moments. I was giving a speech at a corporate event and I put a lot of effort into what I was doing there and they didn't tell me that they invited a deaf person and there was no subtitles, there was nothing. And I was speaking and I would notice at some time that the person is kind of bored. I didn't know why, but normally people are not, at least not bored at my presentations. I don't know if they're successful or not, but people seem to enjoy it and it was like, And then I asked and he thought he would really appreciate at least, well, transcript or whatever. And the first reaction of the people was not, oh my God, so stupid, we should do something. The first reaction was why we invited him. It's like... That's right. And I thought, well, now even technology forces us to think these stupid things. That was the defining moment for me where I personally, as many years ago, it was also not that technologically simple back in days. It was real enough. I know back in days, twenty years ago, that Siemens paid us for consulting because they valued how good internal systems are and how accessible they are when we improved the department got more money. So there was a real competition. Twenty years ago, it was a big deal. But today, it isn't. So let us dig a bit behind the scenes, because finally we have someone who can take us on this journey. Is it complicated? I don't think so. I've spent fifteen years running a company that provides live captioning, initially only human captioning and now both human and AI captioning. And I've also built a platform to deliver live captioning to hybrid events, both AI and human, to online virtual streamed events or in-room events or something that's hybrid. And no, I think we've made it as simple as possible. And there is really no excuse. My mission is always to make it as easy as possible, to give the right education and argument, and to do it at the right price within people's budgets. So there is no excuse for me, as far as I'm concerned, that you can't do it. AI captioning is very, very reasonably priced, although I have seen a couple of providers up their prices, which is interesting. We have tried to keep it really, really reasonable for people. because I would rather they did it than not. I think that AI captioning is probably okay. I don't think it's fantastic. I think it's okay, but it's definitely in the events industry now and it's here to stay. So I think if you want to use AI captioning, you have to think about how can I help it be the best it can be. And when we were doing our platform, Damir, we were talking about suppliers. So I think the first step if you want to start captioning your events, is go and find an expert supplier. I mean, obviously, I would consider myself one of those, but there are a number of others out there. A lot of audiovisual companies, production companies, events companies, they will go to their technical team and say, hey, we need captioning, and the technical team will go, here's a technical solution for this. There you go. But there's no expertise being brought in there. It's just a technical solution to a non-technical problem. That's a super cool topic, because I was yesterday watching, I have to admit, I watched the morning show, I don't know if you know, it's a very fun American series, and the new season is about AI. There's a lot of AI in and they create AI. I shouldn't spoil it, but they create something that's really amazing. It could replace and use completely. AI produce everything from real people. And in the series, you see how it goes amazingly well, but then also not. and there's this negative side where things go really wrong in the very worst moment you can think of and it's everything so horrible obviously this is the series but this is the big question uh with ai with the progress of ai why should we still have humans on board well you're asking the right person and so i have studied ai captioning and i've studied captioning all my life i i know what's hard for a human and interestingly probably fifty percent of what's hard for a human captioner is really hard for AI as well. There are some things that are easy for humans that's hard for AI and vice versa. But AI wasn't built for events of live captioning with people watching it in the moment. AI captioning was not built for that. It was built for universities, dictation, doctors, legal, all of those human typing jobs. It made it You didn't need somebody to type. You could just speak into it. So that's what it was built for, but we're using it as always with AI in completely different ways. And I don't think it's a hundred percent where it's not even, I'd say it's about eighty percent there. When should you use humans? When you have a really, really important subject that you want to, or topic that you want to talk to people, you want them to understand and you want them to feel engaged. If your CEO is giving is all hands to twelve thousand of the companies to announce either profits or losses you should be using humans because that's information that you need to get right okay it needs to be exactly right um i don't think ai is fantastic at accents it is fantastic at some accents and ai is also probably not so good with women with accents it seems much better with deeper voices, not so much with higher voices, which we women have. Numbers, so financial reporting, it mixes up how the numbers are supposed to go together. And also scientific, lots of medical and scientific, it doesn't really do so well. So I would recommend people use humans for all of that. And again, if you really, really want to get that across. But AI is a fantastic solution if you have a broad scale event that is not very technical, that is just talking to people about various things. I think it's fantastic. It can be fantastic because it isn't as expensive as humans and it's a lot easier to set up and you can do it at scale. So if you do, if you have six breakouts, to do that with humans, you could never afford that. But I think a mix of the two is the way forward. And that's something I've created within our platform is the ability to target humans on this and then AI takes over, humans take over, all of that kind of thing. But there's this, I was just, when you were speaking about that, I was thinking about one of our last discussions and I was in London and giving a speech as another conference. And there was Bob Geldof as a keynote speaker on stage. First sentence was okay for UK. I wouldn't say that it's okay for US. It had a lot of efforts in it and it was super fun. It was really cool. but we are a bit more liberal in this case. Well, I'm coming from Germany and we are kind of sensitive to a lot of words as well. You shouldn't be saying this on stage. You can't prevent someone saying something on stage on events, things happen. but you can do something about mispronunciation and perhaps also changing when you see that something was said that you're at least in live transcript is a bit different and what was actually meant. How do you do it? So we've had AccessLoop and that's the platform I've developed. We've created something to really help the AI along. Are you okay if I share my screen? Please. Okay, let me share my screen. Let's hope the technology works, right? Can we see my screen? There we go. So this is Access Loop. I've set up this lovely event for streaming. You add in your streaming details there. you can put in there. There's the captioning. This is for the human captioner. This is the test feature, which is the glossaries feature. I'm just going to add one of these glossaries. You just name your glossaries. I'll set that glossary in. I think I've got some bits in that. You can add any previous ones. I've added lots of words here that I want the AI to look at and go, okay, that's how it When AI understands this, then it should be transcribed differently. Yes, it will transcribe it. I will tell AI what to do, and it needs to be told what to do. I think that's quite important. It will just do what it's told to do, which is translate every word spoken as it sees fit. We're saying, hang on a minute, do it like this. This is a fantastic function, and I don't think any other platform's got it. if you know that the AI is struggling with something, I think, you know, that you know, you can put this in prior to your event, what the word is that the AI, maybe it just goes a lower case on something so candidly. And we wanted to say, go on. I assume the challenge is when you have a multilingual environment, when you say, okay, you have different languages, you want a live transcription, and how many languages are kind of supported? There's over a hundred languages supported on this. This event, this platform will take in one stream of a source language. Let's say it's English and you can send that out to a hundred different languages and you can get a page with a dropdown menu that will display those hundred languages. And you just click on the language you want and the text will appear. This is fantastic because I think we were talking about, you know, an event that I did, which was a mobile phone company. And the product was called Reno, R-E-N-O. And it just kept, the AI would not listen. It kept saying, Reynolds, which is a car, not a phone. So we would just say now, now we would say Reno or we would say Reynolds. So find Reynolds. I'm sorry. And then we would say, replace it with Reno. And then every time that happened, it would immediately replace And you can do on AccessLoop, which is nice, if it's live and you've seen it and your client is screaming, you can do it live and the results are straight away. So before you would have had to take the captions off or get into a lot of trouble. Now there is a save in there. We also have this for the multi-languages. So we have a client who has a product called Dove and it's a shampoo. And that was coming out as Bird of Peace. It was coming out as white bird, and every language had a different translation for dove. That's not ideal because it's a brand name. So we would put in here, do not translate dove. When you see dove, don't translate it. And then it would appear as that in a hundred different languages, just like that. And you can decide whether it's case sensitive or not. And there's also, you were talking about swearing earlier. We have a profanity filter that you can turn that off and you can set that in every language as well. So you can put in those swear words. And it will... A lot of beeps in your transcription. It puts in different characters to save our blushes. In Ireland, they never put it on because it's definitely part of our language. It's part of my cultural language. So this is what we're doing to help that AI and making sure the audio is in really good quality. It's not audio from the room. It's always audio from the sound desk. You have to really understand what it is that you're trying to do and how to get the best out of it. Definitely. And the whole... setup seems quite simple. If we look into it, it's event planner saying, Okay, I have one, one day event, for example, seven hours of content, I have every half an hour, I get in a ten, fifteen sessions, how difficult and how time intensive is to get it going? Again, with Access Leap, it's really easy. We just set up those ten, fifteen events. We press go. We hook the sound in. If you have glossaries for us, we can add those. And then we just off it goes we did five events this morning um with with no trouble and it's it's really simple we i've tried to make it as simple as possible i really have because um while my clear text is using access every single day it's also available to the public so you can just sign up create an account and there is pay and play so you don't have to pay a monthly fee, you don't have to fill in a big registration form, you can sign up and within five minutes you could be sending captions out either to the room that you wanted to go to or to a live stream or to multiple rooms and multiple live streams. Yes, there's no excuses anymore. Now that AccessLoop exists, no special software, no special hardware, nothing. When I have you here, I just got a question. I was just reading it. I made a mistake earlier this year. It was a life-changing mistake, but I gave a keynote about my mistakes. I was speaking about mistakes. If you only hear about success, you get motivated. But how to replicate success is very difficult. There's so much parameters. But from mistakes, you learn everything. This platform is thirty years worth of learning. And we spoke in London about picking up the right supplies. But what are the common mistakes planners do when they think now captioning or I need to work with someone for video? Perhaps I should just take my iPhone and what do you say? What are the common mistakes or say some hints? Think what people should think when they're starting with live streaming and captioning? I think do your research, okay, take some time, do the research, look up the main companies And then have a set of questions, okay? You know, what's the setup? How do you make the captions as good as possible? What about the names of everybody I work with? What about our brand names? You ask those questions. And if the company cannot answer that, then I would move on. If the company doesn't understand themselves what it is they're trying to deliver, then I would say steer clear. I think steer clear of anyone who doesn't, when they speak to you, ask you questions about your event and ask you, you know, one of the first questions when people come to me, I just say, what are you trying to achieve? Do you have people coming who need the service? Is it a tick box? It's OK if it is. It's fine. Is it because you've been asked to do it? Is it last minute? Is it because you have a budget set aside? And then I can approach you with the offers that I think might be most suitable for you. One of our biggest offers at the moment that people really seem to love is they come and say, oh, I've only got a few hundred pounds. It's an all day event. And we go through the agenda with them and we say, what's the most important thing on this agenda? And they'll say, oh, that keynote. And we say, well, how about we use humans on that? And we say, what else is important? And we make sure we fit their budget. But what they're getting is the most accurate captions for their budget, rather than them coming to me, someone else, and someone else saying, what's your budget? Yeah, we can do AI captions for that. We're getting you the best we can for your budget. And AccessLoop absolutely allows us to do that. as a captioning company. I mean, I've built it and developed it, but I'm really seeing the power in it now as a captioning company using it and bringing it into our whole workflow. It's been incredible. And it's very hard to set up on your own and self fund and do all these things. But I really feel that there are two years of expertise that I have needs to be put into a platform because I see a lot of platforms where they just don't understand what it is they're trying to do. They have great developers, they have a great idea, but that little kinds of nuance and those little things that matter, like in the glossaries, they just have one thing you added up. They don't think about what happens after, when it goes wrong in their lives, what can we do? So I'm building solutions for events because I'm doing events every single day. That's my job. My job is to deliver accessibility to events. So I've built something that will do that. I always try to take some notes and I kind of think with mental notes and say, what is my takeaway? But my takeaway from everything we discussed is that if you do it properly, it is not that complicated. It's also not that time intensive. But if you don't, it could become a major headache. And with today's solution and technologies, we shouldn't go the easy way just because of whatever. Because as I said, the proper way is already here. And I'm quite amazed with everything what is happening right now. But as you see, I'm strategic event ninja. So I always think it is. a few steps ahead, or at least I try. I see a lot of videos now, they are not synchronized anymore because they are even lip-synced. So you have a perfect augmentation. So a person is even using their own voice with AI kind of fitted into like, I'm sounding like me in English, but my accent is way better. And this is what happens in video. There's a big discussion around that. Does it make sense? Should we... just lose or what makes us interesting and unique, just having those perfect AI avatars running around. But this is one direction. The other direction, obviously, I see live captioning becoming absolute mainstream, changing from you should have it or why is it not available? But do you see how it will evolve in the next time? Yeah, I think it will become mainstream. I think, you know, like I say, fifteen years ago when I started my company, I had to do a much harder sell. And it was people who understood and knew and had a strategy around making things accessible that were, or people were requesting. We did a lot of work there. Now, it's not about requests. It's just about, we need captioning. But I think people are too quick to see it as this AI, as this quick, easy solution, cheap, boom. And I said to you before, we need to be really careful about our attitudes toward accessibility. What other part of your event do you have the attitude of, great, there's an app. Let's get it in. Boom, I'm done. We don't have that attitude. We spend hours pouring across the registration, the look of the show, the slides, the atmosphere, the goodie bags. So much thought goes into that, so much planning, so much budget. Anything to do with accessibility needs exactly the same type of thinking, budget, and approach. So I think AI captioning is a fantastic addition, but it hasn't solved the problem. It's part of the solution. And working with suppliers like me and other suppliers, referenceable suppliers, you can have that solution, but you can have it at its best. And I think that's what we should be giving our delegates, our audiences, people coming to our events who are taking time out of their day. And I think this next generation has an expectation around accessibility, inclusion, diversity. And if they're in an event and they're not seeing that at quality, that will affect your brand. That will affect your audience, everything. And do it right. Everybody's happy. Your brand looks good. Fantastic. You know, do it badly. What does that say about you as a brand that you don't value people who need live captioning or other adjustments? That's what you're saying when you put up something that's not the best it can be. That's my final statement, Demir. There's always more to say. This was inspiring and full of practical advice. Thank you for sharing your expertise. And to our audience, as you heard, accessibility isn't just compliance. It's audience care, it's inclusion, it's brand reputation. And live captioning is one of the simplest ways to make your events more inclusive and future ready. You will hear more about this at InControl Summit. Not the time to speak about this right now because we ran out of time already. Exactly. To hear more, and we both will be speaking at InControl Summit. We will post a few links after. But thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And looking forward to our next meeting. Me too. Thanks, everybody. Bye.