Not sure if this is a stretch, but has anyone managed to get automated #captions (or CART) and shareable live #transcriptions working with the public #Jitsi Meet instance, even via a third-party app?
I'm not interested in self-hosting, and I'm open to paid solutions. I know that there are some services that offer a bot that you can invite into your meeting to transcribe, but the ones I've tried don't work with Jitsi (Iist in 🧵)
Here's what I've tried so far (unsuccessfully):
- Fireflies: the bot was in the meeting and recording, but there was no live transcript
- OtterPilot
- Tactiq
- Krisp.ai
- Notta Bot
- Meeting Baas Trancript Seeker
- Speechnotes
- Reduct.video
I've used the Help/Contact feature to request Jitsi integrations for all these apps. In the meantime, still on the lookout...
Also looked into Jitsi as a Service (8x8), and that has captions, but it seems to be aimed at developers and app makers.
I don't need AI summaries, topic tagging, chatbots that can query the notes, etc.
Just need an easy, automated way of generating captions that remote meeting participants can access in real time (no sign-in), and that can (ideally) be displayed alongside the meeting.
It can be...
- a bot I invite to the meeting,
- some kind of desktop app that connects to my mic directly
- a platform that I can livestream the meeting to, and that will display the transcript at a shareable link
So far, after some days of testing, the only solutions I found are:
- Using a continuous voice typing keyboard app on my Android to transcribe into a Etherpad document, and sharing that.
- Livestreaming the Jitsi meeting to YouTube (auto-captions require 1k subscribers, though)
- Giving up on Jitsi, and just using Zoom / Google Meet / whatever else that has this out of the box
Also, if anyone *was* using Jitsi and moved to something else entirely, I'd love to hear about those experiences.
Alrighty, I have a few more leads (because I'm still obsessing over this):
1. I discovered https://beta.meet.jit.si today, and this #Jitsi version has a "Subtitles" button. It only works if the person speaking is using a Chrome-ish browser, but will display on Firefox. That said, it only works for a few mins before failing...
Edit: Turns out I was at the right place at the right time lol, and they have no plans of offering subtitles in the hosted version (https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/15247)
2. Another option could be to use #CaptionNinja: https://caption.ninja. It's a #WebCaptioner replacement, and only works on Chrome (and co). Caption Ninja is cool, though, because:
- it has a live feed that can be shared with others or added into #OBS as a browser source overlay thingie
- it seems pretty customizable (https://github.com/steveseguin/captionninja),
- it has a manual text entry mode (for stenographers?)
- can add speaker labels
Caption Ninja can even do real-time auto translations (see demo GIF)
I'm not sure if it'll work alongside Jitsi, or if I would have to capture these captions and transcripts on separate devices... The ideal would still be to have captions and transcripts that can be toggled on and off within Jitsi.
Update on my attempts to make #captions work for #Jitsi:
I've heard back from the following re: no plans to support Jitsi Meet: #OtterPilot, #MeetingBaas, #ReductVideo, Fireflies
#Tactiq said it's planned, but no timeline.
Tried reaching out to #8x8 for a quote, but they never followed up...
So far, my options are to run #CaptionNinja alongside Jitsi (free), or to embed a Jitsi-as-a-Service meeting iframe on a web page and enable captions (premium).
Almost forgot another third, not so FOSS-y option: livestreaming to YouTube and making use of their automatic live captions (free).
In your stream settings, make sure:
- your video is set to "Normal latency"
- toggle "Closed captions" on
- if this is your first time streaming on YouTube, create the stream at least 24hrs before, because YT will put a delay on your first one
Livestreaming a Jitsi meeting to Peertube is also possible, but the captions only get added once the stream is complete.
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