InterSpeech 2021

Live Subtitling for BigBlueButton with Open-Source Software
(3 minutes introduction)

Robert Geislinger (HITeC, Germany), Benjamin Milde (HITeC, Germany), Timo Baumann (Universität Hamburg, Germany), Chris Biemann (Universität Hamburg, Germany)
We present an open source plugin for live subtitling in the popular open source video conferencing software BigBlueButton. Our plugin decodes each speaker’s audio stream separately and in parallel, thereby obliviating the need for speaker diarization and seamlessly handling overlapped talk. Any Kaldi-compatible nnet3 model can be used with our plugin and we demonstrate it using freely available TDNN-HMM-based ASR models for English and German. Our subtitles can be used as they are (e.g., in loud environments) or can form the basis for further NLP processes. Our tool can also simplify the collection of remotely recorded multi-party dialogue corpora.