I’m sure the powers that be have to be furiously working on switching it over to a completely automatic voice recognition machine-based system. It will be immensely more efficient (read cheaper). Plus, Siri aside, voice recognition **has **made enormous advancements in the last five years.
Not too long ago I was watching some cop show where the person interviewed yelled, “It wasn’t me!”
CC had him yelling, “It was me!”
I wonder how many deaf viewers spent a moment or two trying to figure out why the cops were completely disregarding a murder confession?
You wouldn’t know it from reading the voicemail transcriptions that Vonage emails to me.
One that mystifies me to this day: the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa discovers that nerd sweat attracts bullies, and salad dressing makes nerds “invisible” to them. When Lisa and Marge are backstage at a scientific conference getting ready to present her findings, Lisa points out that the audience is full of scientific notables, including “the inventor of the walkie-talkie”. Marge gasps, “And that’s not his wife!”
But the caption says “the inventor of the no-spill mug.” No idea why they made the change; it’s not like one is harder to spell than the other. My only guess is that “walkie-talkie” isn’t meaningful to the hearing-impaired.
I always assumed that when there is an alternate joke in the closed captioning (not that uncommon), that the closed captioners were working from a script or a pre-broadcast version of the show that got changed at the last minute.