Free phone for deaf and hard of hearing from Caption Call

Quote from NotReal : I think when they use the term "m e d i c a l l y recognized" the intent is to actually have a documented hearing loss from an audiologist for the person applying. Lets not turn this service into an "Obama Phone"

Unfortunately the captioning telephone service industry is already deep into the realm of the "Obama phone". I work for a captioning company that takes calls across the country and over the last 10 months and ~20,000 calls I have had to caption I would guess maybe 1,000 of them were for people who had medical hearing loss. 10,000 were for people that used the captions as a backup that maybe in case they missed something they could reference it and the other 9,000 clearly just wanted a free phone. It's clear also that 90% of the people that use the service or are on the other end of the phone have no idea that there is a live person that has to repeat with their mouth verbatim every little murmur or sound that comes out of their mouth. Therefore they don't know it would make it impossible to caption accurately if lots of people were in the room talking the background or they had loud music playing. Even if you can talk like the Jimmy John's radio commercial guy and type 150 wpm it just isn't possible to record 3-4 people talking at the same time while indicating a change of speaker and making corrections for a voice recognition software that is inaccurate when you are speaking that fast and erratically trying to change the pace to match the people speaking. You end up falling way behind and that's when you realize the people are not even relying on your captions at all.

It's no wonder my company has a very high turnover rate while otherwise being a pretty decent place to work. Don't get me wrong, the service is great and if used properly can be a godsend for people with hearing loss. It is a pleasure captioning a call for people who you can tell actually need it and when the pace is reasonable and the people speak somewhat clear it is remarkable how accurate the voice recognition software picks up my voice and relays it to the client. The delay of 3-4 seconds is because there is the information passing through multiple lines and software that just isn't as good as one would hope. There is also the occasional time when someone such as myself needs to take a drink or sneeze. This is the disadvantage of being human . In comparison, a 100% computerized service will never compare to a live speaker because people do not all speak alike(or clear) and most all phone calls have some static or points when people are breaking up which the computer would just put some random word in it's place while a live speaker can at least hit a macro to tell the client the phone is breaking up. Take for example the youtube transcript program. When videos are showing people arguing or talking unclear and with music in the background going on it isn't accurate at all. Here is a video called "Hillbilly Couple Fighting On Drugs" warning NSFW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKknw8L3ZD0. The transcript program doesn't even come close. Try to imagine sitting at your desk in a loud and busy call center and getting a call that you have to repeat verbatim and it sounds like that. The sad thing is, around 1/3 of the calls coming in are from people just like that.

The issue is phone companies are looking to expand and boost profits at the expense of their employees sanity and well being. They make is so easy to qualify that anyone can get a free phone. But because more clients equals more government funding for the company and a more recognizable name we all know that will never change. Instead it becomes the responsibility of the people to avoid taking advantage of programs that they don't deserve or legitimately qualify for. It might seem like taking advantage of a government funded program is not going to make a difference because the government would just piss that money away anyways, but there might be innocent bystanders who suffer such as people like myself.