Category: Lessons Learned

Auto captioning a live video on Facebook

Photo of an eagle and eaglet in a nest next to words that say
Facebook Live –  ways to increase accessibility

Facebook’s live broadcasting is getting a lot of attention and can be a valuable way to connect to audiences, expand your reach, and share experiences with others. Facebook is currently working to make things more accessible so that anyone can tune in. At the USFWS’s National Conservation Training Center they have been doing live with automated captions. They still need editing afterward, but details for setting it up can be found below. The following instructions were graciously shared from Melissa Gonzalez at the National Conservation Training Center.

First, you will need to monitor your live video using Facebook Live Producer.

Here’s one way to get there

  1. Start your live video using a mobile phone or computer.
  2. After going live, use a computer browser to visit your Facebook page.
  3. Once on your page, go to “Publishing Tools”. You can find this option in different places, depending on the Facebook View you’re on (“Classic View” or “New Facebook”).
  4. Go to “Published Posts” and click on your live video.
  5. A new window with a preview of your post will open. Click on the ellipsis on the top right, select “Edit Post”. This will take you to open your live video, on a tool called “Facebook Live Producer“.

    1_OpeningFacebook_Live_Producer (1)
    Open Facebook Live Producer and select ‘edit post’.

Next, enable the auto-generated captioning feature

Using the Facebook Live Producer tool

  1. Look towards the middle of the screen to find a horizontal menu with a couple of options: Stream Setup, Stream Health, Video Clipping, Polls, Questions, Help.
  2. Click on “Stream Setup”.
  3. Scroll down to “Viewing”, check the “Auto-Generated Captions” box.2_StreamSetUp_Auto-GeneratedCaptions_on
    Ensure the auto-generated captions are turned on in the bottom left corner of your screen.
  4. To confirm that your captions have now been enabled, scroll up and hover over that video preview and a couple of options will show up.
  5. Look for the gear or settings icon. Click on the gear or settings icon.
  6. Choose “Captions [auto-generated]” ON. Make sure the slider is blue and says ON.
  7. Your captions will now show on the bottom left side of the live video preview

After you finish your broadcast, it’s important you go back through and double-check those captions. Seeing how the captions auto-populate can be informative and a good reminder to speak clearly.  But going back through and fixing these is an important habit to get into.

Please let me know if you have other tips for making Live more accessible!

 

The Wild Life of Social Media and Content Strategy

I was honored to present a workshop and keynote at the J.Boye Conference about using social media to enhance your content strategy. The incredibly intelligent and savvy web users from all over the globe that attended this conference taught me a few new tricks for improving the way we work online to better engage with our constituents. From improving usability, creating a customer experience people actually want to engaging with generation y, all gave me new information to chew on and digest.

Janus Boye and Danielle BrigidaAside from using the digital ecosystem to reach new people, engage better with customers, build out higher quality services, and expand how people use technology and engage with entities, they also let me geek out about wildlife and how we’re exploring using technology to create a more transparent and responsive approach for our Government agency.

I also wrote about how we’re expanding on successful interactions can create a more enriching experience and give people more context. We hope we can make use of the way people use social media to inform and arm those with the facts they find interesting. As we continue to learn more about how we can serve as a resource, it’s incredibly important to go to conferences like this one to learn best practices across many entities.