Modeling and improving text stability in live captions

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Posted by Vikas Bahirwani, Research Scientist, and Susan Xu, Software Engineer, Google Augmented Reality

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has made conversations more accessible with live captions in remote conferencing software, mobile applications, and head-worn displays. However, to maintain real-time responsiveness, live caption systems often display interim predictions that are updated as new utterances are received. This can cause text instability (a “flicker” where previously displayed text is updated, shown in the captions on the left in the video below), which can impair users’ reading experience due to distraction, fatigue, and difficulty following the conversation.

In “Modeling and Improving Text Stability in Live Captions”, presented at ACM CHI 2023, we formalize this problem of text stability through a few key contributions. First, we quantify the text instability by employing a vision-based flicker metric that uses luminance contrast and discrete Fourier transform. Second, we also introduce a stability algorithm to stabilize the rendering of live captions via tokenized alignment, semantic merging, and smooth animation. Finally, we conducted a user study (N=123) to understand viewers’ experience with live captioning. Our statistical analysis demonstrates a strong correlation between our proposed flicker metric and viewers’ experience. Furthermore, it shows that our proposed stabilization techniques significantly improves viewers’ experience (e.g., the captions on the right in the video above).

Raw ASR captions vs. stabilized captions

Metric

Inspired by previous work, we propose a flicker-based metric to quantify text stability and objectively evaluate the performance of live captioning systems. Specifically, our goal is to quantify the flicker in a grayscale live caption video. We achieve this by comparing the difference in luminance between individual frames (frames in the figures below) that constitute the video. Large visual changes in luminance are obvious (e.g., addition of the word “bright” in the figure on the bottom), but subtle changes (e.g., update from “… this gold. Nice..” to “… this. Gold is nice”) may be difficult to discern for readers. However, converting the change in luminance to its constituting frequencies exposes both the obvious and subtle changes.

Thus, for each pair of contiguous frames, we convert the difference in luminance into its constituting frequencies using discrete Fourier transform. We then sum over each of the low and high frequencies to quantify the flicker in this pair. Finally, we average over all of the frame-pairs to get a per-video flicker.

For instance, we can see below that two identical frames (top) yield a flicker of 0, while two non-identical frames (bottom) yield a non-zero flicker. It is worth noting that higher values of the metric indicate high flicker in the video and thus, a worse user experience than lower values of the metric.

Illustration of the flicker metric between two identical frames.

Illustration of the flicker between two non-identical frames.

Stability algorithm

To improve the stability of live captions, we propose an algorithm that takes as input already rendered sequence of tokens (e.g., “Previous” in the figure below) and the new sequence of ASR predictions, and outputs an updated stabilized text (e.g., “Updated text (with stabilization)” below). It considers both the natural language understanding (NLU) aspect as well as the ergonomic aspect (display, layout, etc.) of the user experience in deciding when and how to produce a stable updated text. Specifically, our algorithm performs tokenized alignment, semantic merging, and smooth animation to achieve this goal. In what follows, a token is defined as a word or punctuation produced by ASR.

We show (a) the previously already rendered text, (b) the baseline layout of updated text without our merging algorithm, and (c) the updated text as generated by our stabilization algorithm.

Our algorithm address the challenge of producing stabilized updated text by first identifying three classes of changes (highlighted in red, green, and blue below):

1. Red: Addition of tokens to the end of previously rendered captions (e.g., “How about”).
2. Green: Addition / deletion of tokens, in the middle of already rendered captions.
   • B1: Addition of tokens (e.g., “I” and “friends”). These may or may not affect the overall comprehension of the captions, but may lead to layout change. Such layout changes are not desired in live captions as they cause significant jitter and poorer user experience. Here “I” does not add to the comprehension but “friends” does. Thus, it is important to balance updates with stability specially for B1 type tokens.
   • B2: Removal of tokens, e.g., “in” is removed in the updated sentence.
3. Blue: Re-captioning of tokens: This includes token edits that may or may not have an impact on the overall comprehension of the captions.
• C1: Proper nouns like “disney land” are updated to “Disneyland”.
• C2: Grammatical shorthands like “it’s” are updated to “It was”.

Classes of changes between previously displayed and updated text.

Alignment, merging, and smoothing

To maximize text stability, our goal is to align the old sequence with the new sequence using updates that make minimal changes to the existing layout while ensuring accurate and meaningful captions. To achieve this, we leverage a variant of the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm with dynamic programming to merge the two sequences depending on the class of tokens as defined above:

• Case A tokens: We directly add case A tokens, and line breaks as needed to fit the updated captions.
• Case B tokens: Our preliminary studies showed that users preferred stability over accuracy for previously displayed captions. Thus, we only update case B tokens if the updates do not break an existing line layout.
• Case C tokens: We compare the semantic similarity of case C tokens by transforming original and updated sentences into sentence embeddings, measuring their dot-product, and updating them only if they are semantically different (similarity < 0.85) and the update will not cause new line breaks.

Finally, we leverage animations to reduce visual jitter. We implement smooth scrolling and fading of newly added tokens to further stabilize the overall layout of the live captions.

User evaluation

We conducted a user study with 123 participants to (1) examine the correlation of our proposed flicker metric with viewers’ experience of the live captions, and (2) assess the effectiveness of our stabilization techniques.

We manually selected 20 videos in YouTube to obtain a broad coverage of topics including video conferences, documentaries, academic talks, tutorials, news, comedy, and more. For each video, we selected a 30-second clip with at least 90% speech.

We prepared four types of renderings of live captions to compare:

1. Raw ASR: raw speech-to-text results from a speech-to-text API.
2. Raw ASR + thresholding: only display interim speech-to-text result if its confidence score is higher than 0.85.
3. Stabilized captions: captions using our algorithm described above with alignment and merging.
4. Stabilized and smooth captions: stabilized captions with smooth animation (scrolling + fading) to assess whether softened display experience helps improve the user experience.

We collected user ratings by asking the participants to watch the recorded live captions and rate their assessments of comfort, distraction, ease of reading, ease of following the video, fatigue, and whether the captions impaired their experience.

Correlation between flicker metric and user experience

We calculated Spearman’s coefficient between the flicker metric and each of the behavioral measurements (values range from -1 to 1, where negative values indicate a negative relationship between the two variables, positive values indicate a positive relationship, and zero indicates no relationship). Shown below, our study demonstrates statistically significant (𝑝 < 0.001) correlations between our flicker metric and users’ ratings. The absolute values of the coefficient are around 0.3, indicating a moderate relationship.

Behavioral Measurement	Correlation to Flickering Metric*
Comfort	-0.29
Distraction	0.33
Easy to read	-0.31
Easy to follow videos	-0.29
Fatigue	0.36
Impaired Experience	0.31

Spearman correlation tests of our proposed flickering metric. *p < 0.001.

Stabilization of live captions

Our proposed technique (stabilized smooth captions) received consistently better ratings, significant as measured by the Mann-Whitney U test (p < 0.01 in the figure below), in five out of six aforementioned survey statements. That is, users considered the stabilized captions with smoothing to be more comfortable and easier to read, while feeling less distraction, fatigue, and impairment to their experience than other types of rendering.

User ratings from 1 (Strongly Disagree) – 7 (Strongly Agree) on survey statements. (**: p<0.01, ***: p<0.001; ****: p<0.0001; ns: non-significant)

Conclusion and future direction

Text instability in live captioning significantly impairs users’ reading experience. This work proposes a vision-based metric to model caption stability that statistically significantly correlates with users’ experience, and an algorithm to stabilize the rendering of live captions. Our proposed solution can be potentially integrated into existing ASR systems to enhance the usability of live captions for a variety of users, including those with translation needs or those with hearing accessibility needs.

Our work represents a substantial step towards measuring and improving text stability. This can be evolved to include language-based metrics that focus on the consistency of the words and phrases used in live captions over time. These metrics may provide a reflection of user discomfort as it relates to language comprehension and understanding in real-world scenarios. We are also interested in conducting eye-tracking studies (e.g., videos shown below) to track viewers’ gaze patterns, such as eye fixation and saccades, allowing us to better understand the types of errors that are most distracting and how to improve text stability for those.

Illustration of tracking a viewer’s gaze when reading raw ASR captions.

Illustration of tracking a viewer’s gaze when reading stabilized and smoothed captions.

By improving text stability in live captions, we can create more effective communication tools and improve how people connect in everyday conversations in familiar or, through translation, unfamiliar languages.

Acknowledgements

This work is a collaboration across multiple teams at Google. Key contributors include Xingyu “Bruce” Liu, Jun Zhang, Leonardo Ferrer, Susan Xu, Vikas Bahirwani, Boris Smus, Alex Olwal, and Ruofei Du. We wish to extend our thanks to our colleagues who provided assistance, including Nishtha Bhatia, Max Spear, and Darcy Philippon. We would also like to thank Lin Li, Evan Parker, and CHI 2023 reviewers.