Closed Captioning is Popular But Can be Biased

For people who are hard of hearing, or who are watching TV in a noisy environment (e.g. a sports bar), closed captioning makes all the difference between enjoying or not enjoying the broadcast. People who are hard of hearing are protected by federal law. Even for people who are not hard of hearing it can make the difference between enjoying and not enjoying what they are seeing on TV, for example dealing with foreign accents or special vocabularies. But according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, the automated speech recognition systems used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Apple make twice as many errors when interpreting black speech as they do when interpreting the same words spoken by whites.