Captions & Subtitles
With Goldcast's new captions & subtitles features, you will now be able to offer speech-to-text captions and translated subtitles for live and prerecorded content. Captions display the words the speaker is speaking in the same language, and may be useful for people who are hard of hearing, Deaf, or prefer to read along with speakers. Subtitles translate these captions into different languages, and can be useful for those tuning in from different countries or who speak other languages than the speaker.
Note: Captions & Subtitles are a paid feature only included in our Enterprise package. Organizers interested in Hybrid events with Growth or Premier packages should reach out to their CSM to discuss their options.
To enable captions and/or subtitles (translated captions) in your Goldcast account, contact your CSM for more details.
Enabling Captions and Translated Subtitles
Things to remember:
- In order to use captions or subtitles in your event, you must also enable broadcast recordings. See this doc for instructions.
- Captions and subtitles MUST be enabled no less than 10 minutes prior to your event start time.
- Sessions that are longer than 9 hours will not be recorded and cannot have captions enabled. Please contact Goldcast for further assistance if you require captions for a session longer than 9 hours.
Once your CSM has enabled captions and subtitles in your Goldcast account, open the event you want to turn them on for and first navigate to the event Details page. In the "Primary Language" dropdown, select the language the speakers will be speaking during your event. This is the language that will be presented as speech-to-text captions on the event stage.
Currently you may choose from: Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish (Chinese, Italian and Portuguese are options in this dropdown, but captions will not work for speakers speaking in Chinese, Italian or Portuguese). Select your language and click save.
Note that the primary language you select will also change the primary language the event navigation bar, buttons, etc. display in. See this document for more details.
Next, navigate to the Space tab. You will see a "Captions" and a "Subtitles" toggle on the right side of the tab.
Turn on the "Captions" toggle to enable speech-to-text captions. Turn on the "Subtitles" toggle to enable your attendees to translate the captions into other languages.
Note: Captions must be turned on first in order to enable subtitles too.
If you see a tooltip like the one below, captions and subtitles have not yet been enabled for your organization. Contact your CSM for assistance.
Once captions are enabled for your event, inside your event app attendees can hover over the stage and click the CC button to turn them on - you don't need to do anything else! Captions are supported for events hosted in spoken languages including Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish (speech-to-text Chinese and Italian are not supported at this time).
If you have enabled subtitles as well, attendees will see a dropdown button they can click to see a list of supported languages and select the one they want to view captions in. Currently Goldcast supports translated subtitles in Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.
When testing captions and subtitles
If you are testing captions and subtitles on an event marked as a test, or on a broadcast that has not reached its start time, you must bring the Recorder for this broadcast online manually. To do this, open the controls by copying and pasting your event URL into another tab, delete everything past the event ID, and add "livenesscontrol" to the end.
For example, if your event URL is: https://events.goldcast.io/e/0xx0x000-xxx0-0x0x-0000-f146f858264a/stage, then delete "stage" and add "livenesscontrol", so your URL now looks like this: https://events.goldcast.io/e/0xx0x000-xxx0-0x0x-0000-f146f858264a/livenesscontrol. Load the page.
Now click the circle Recorder button next to the broadcast you would like to test captions or subtitles for. It may take 2-3 minutes for the Recorder to start and captions to display.
Contact your Goldcast CSM learn more about adding captions and subtitles to your next Goldcast event.