08-25-2006

Captel Inc, Madison, Wis, plans to open a new captioning center in Milwaukee. The company has an existing captioning center in the University Research Park, Madison, Wis.

Captel Inc provides telephone-captioning service for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. At the center, highly trained operators use sophisticated computer voice recognition technology to transcribe telephone conversations into real-time written captions. The written captions appear on the display screen of the user’s specially designed CapTel™ telephone, enabling people who are deaf or hard of hearing to read word-for-word captions of what is being said throughout their telephone calls. Ultratec Inc, Madison, Wis, developed the CapTel telephone.

The new captioning center is being set up in response to the popularity of the CapTel telephone, which has been extremely well received by people with hearing loss, according to the company. Having two centers also ensures minimum interruptions in service if something unexpectedly halts operations in one center. In that case, traffic from one center can automatically be routed to the other.

The service, which is provided as part of each state’s Telecommunications Relay Service, is currently available in 39 states and nationwide for federal employees in any state.

[SOURCE: CapTel, August 2006]