I’m still a CapTel wannabee. With Sprint Nextel’s recent announcement of the addition of CapTel Relay Service in New Hampshire, the real-time telephone captioning service is now available in 32 states. It’s also available to current and retired federal employees including military veterans, as well as to U.S. tribal members. But it’s not available in Massachusetts, where I live. I’m going to get after the state telecommunications regulators to see what’s taking so long. The CapTel service is the next giant step beyond traditional voice carry-over (VCO) relay services. VCO service engages an operator who transcribes the conversation of the hearing person and transmits it to the hard-of-hearing person’s computer or TTY terminal. With the CapTel service, the operator transmits real-time captions directly to a display on your CapTel-ready phone, so you don’t need a second device to read the captions. Plus, when you make an outgoing call, the service is engaged immediately, versus VCO services where you have to place the call through the service provider. And the captioning is done in real-time, just like the captions on TV, by an operator who uses court-reporter transcription technology combined with some voice-recognition software.
You need a special phone, which is designed and sold by Ultratec, a manufacturer of TTY terminals and other devices. If you get a two-line version of the phone, people can call you directly and the operator will automatically engage (the one-line phone still requires incoming calls to be placed through the relay servicer rather than directly). All these benefits eliminate many of the major hurdles that continue to plague hard-of-hearing people who can’t use the phone. The VCO relay services are a godsend for basic communications but still are cumbersome for use in business and other spontaneous conversations where the delay caused by engagement with the operator is impractical. So CapTel will put a lot of currently well-educated, hard-working and intelligent people back to productive work at jobs that require more use of the phone than they can handle with the more limited VCO relay service. Then why doesn’t every state offer CapTel today? One of the reasons may be that the service is currently provided free to people who need it under state telecommunications access regulations, imposing a cost to carriers that they won’t want to bear unless the state lets them cover it with a general rate increase. CapTel is the kind of “if you build it, they will come” service that will generate a lot of new demand, so I imagine the cost considerations are material for both the carrier and the regulators alike. I’ll let you know how my inquiries go in Massachusetts as I try to migrate from CapTel wannabee to CapTel user.