InnoCaption Connect: Bridging the Communication Gap for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Inmates

welcome to this Week in Hearing. I’m Shari Eberts, co author of Hear & Beyond Lives Skillfully with Hearing Loss. And my guest today is Paul Lee, the COO of InnoCaption, a certified IP caption telephone service provider that uses a combination of live stenographers and AI to provide real time captioning for smartphone calls. InnoCaption is a favorite of many of us in the hearing loss community because it’s so easy to use and because of their terrific customer service. So thank you Paul, for being here to talk about the latest announcement from In a Caption, a new service that provides telecommunication access for the deaf and hard of hearing population in prisons. So it’s great to see you again. Thank you for having me. Shari, it’s wonderful to see you again as well. Absolutely. So before we dive into the meat of our conversation, I loved hearing your backstory at the InnoCaption consumer event a couple months ago in October. And I was hoping you could share how and why you became involved in the company and what led you to your current role. Yeah, sure. So I am currently the chief operating officer here at Innocaption, based in Southern California. And I’ve been with the company for five years. Right now I lead day to day operations for the business and I focus a lot of my time on product development, technology, roadmaps, and I also work closely with our marketing team so that I can keep in close touch with the user community that we serve. But before I joined the InnoCaption team, I had a very different career path. After graduating from college, I started my career as an investment banking analyst on Wall Street. And I know that we share that background, you and I. I then went on to work in the private equity industry. I had the opportunity to invest in companies and sit on boards for a large variety of industries. It ranged from fried chicken fast food chains to commercial real estate services, and even a global nursery chain based in the UK. And throughout my finance career, I got the chance to live and work in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and finally London. And then it’s early 2020. I decided to leave my international finance career behind. I convinced my wife to quit her job as well. And along with our two young boys, we moved from London to California to join the InnoCaption team. It wasn’t an easy decision. It meant taking a pretty sizable pay cut, rebuilding my career from scratch and working in an environment where we didn’t have resources or capital because we weren’t a venture backed startup, it was a bootstrap startup. But at the end of the day the reason I chose to make the difficult move was mainly because I was inspired by two key individuals. And the first one was my father. He is the founder and co CEO of InnoCaption. He invested a ton of time and energy and sweat and tears in developing this technology and getting this business off the ground. And in doing so he was able to introduce so many innovations in our industry. Like being the first caption phone provider that focused on mobile apps instead of landline phones. The first to use live stenographers to generate faster, higher quality captioning. And he was able to drive that kind of innovation and bring that entrepreneurial spirit to the business. The second inspiration was Joe Duarte, our other co CEO. Joe has been profoundly Deaf since childhood and he now uses bilateral cochlear implants. Meeting Joe, getting to know him, learning his life story, it gave me such a deeper appreciation for the positive impact that services like InnoCaption can have. And his ability to overcome communication challenges through his determination and use of technology was really inspiring. And both my father and Joe invested not only their time and, and dedication but a significant portion of the retirement funds as well to making sure that this service became a reality. And so my personal mission behind joining the intercaption team was to make sure that I was a good steward of my father’s legacy, of Joe’s legacy, and to make sure that this amazing service was widely known and made available to everyone who needed it because we knew what it could do. So it’s been I’ve been working harder than ever since I, since I joined the team. But frankly it’s been such a fulfilling and impactful experience for myself as well. And I’m just really glad that I made that change and took that leap of faith. I love that story even more the second time that I heard it. I think it’s just so wonderful when someone can follow their passion and also make such a difference for so many people. So congratulations on that and thank you for sharing that with everybody. Thank you Shari. So for people who are unfamiliar with Innocaption, can you talk a little bit more about what the company does and I guess most, most importantly for maybe some of the consumers watching, why it’s free for consumers to use. Sure. So InnoCaption, in a nutshell, we provide fast and accurate real time captioning of phone calls through a mobile app. Users can download our app from the App Store or the Play Store, register for an account, and then make and receive calls within the app. The app’s compatible on smartphones, tablets, as well as your desktop computer if you use our web portal as well. And what’s really unique about our service is that we offer users a choice between best in class AI captioning technology or a live stenographer. So our users can actually switch between these two caption modes before or even in the middle of a call. And our live captioners are available 24/7. We once had a user reach out to us letting us know that she got past her first round phone interviews and didn’t have to disclose that she had a hearing loss because of our service. This is the kind of example of the empowering technology that we’re able to provide our users and give them the confidence to take important calls on their own and always knowing that accurate captions will be made available to them. As you mentioned, our service is free of charge to eligible consumers. And that is also a really nice part about our service. This is because we are certified and funded through the FCC’s Telecommunications Relay Services Fund. To be eligible to use the service, you need to be in the United States and you have to self certify that you have a need for captions because of your hearing loss. We’re one of a small number of providers with this FCC certification. And what that means is we abide by strict federal regulations that dictate how we run the business. The privacy standards that we have to abide by and the security measures that we put in place. And we also undergo audits by the FCC to make sure we actually follow those rules as well. But in exchange, we’re able to offer the service free to the consumer, which is amazing. And the consumer loves that it’s free. I know a lot of HLAA members are very big fans of the service. So talk, I guess a little bit about what inspired InnoCaption to bring this service to prisons. Is hearing loss common in this population and what services are currently available there? Yeah, so a lot of times, as I mentioned before how the individuals, my father and Joe inspired me from a personal perspective. I think a lot of times personal stories are really what sparks inspiration. And in this case it’s really no different. We actually read many articles and stories a few years ago about challenges that people faced with the justice system if you were deaf or hard of hearing. I remember one story was a Deaf individual in Minnesota, he was temporarily taken to a county jail for a minor offense. But when he asked to call his employer so that he could let his boss know that he wouldn’t be making it to work that day, the jail didn’t have an accessible phone solution for him. So he wasn’t able to call his boss, he wasn’t able to call his family, and he was just stuck in this isolated state. There was another case of an individual that was Deaf in Georgia who was incarcerated in a prison. And while there, he couldn’t attend vocational training classes, he couldn’t get access to health care, or speak with his advisors on how to prepare for his parole hearings after a few years. And so these are circumstances where individuals are really living in a prison within a prison and not on equal footing with other hearing individuals in the same setting. And so our company’s mission is to really provide equal access to individuals with a hearing loss, wherever they may be. And so along this line, we are trying to bring a service that can actually help bridge that accessibility gap. And to your question on the prevalence the Bureau of Justice statistics indicate about 10% of inmates in prisons have hearing loss, which would equate to a population of over 100,000 people that might face communication challenges. And historically there’s been fairly limited accessibility communications technology in these settings. Youd have maybe TTYs or some landline caption phones that are usually held in a back room and not readily accessible for people to be able to use when needed. And so our hope is that with better access, these types of individuals can stay connected with their families, their support networks, and make it easier for them to safely reintegrate into the society after they serve their time. Oh, I love that. And I never would have thought that it was such a, that 10% of the incarcerated population would be impacted by this. That’s not, that’s not small. It’s not a small number. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So how does the new captioning service for prisons work? And how do you address any security concerns? Yeah, so we started researching on this a few years ago and partnered actually with specialized telecom companies that provide general phone services to correctional facilities. And what we have come up with is a service that essentially allows those telecommunications companies to create a mobile app that integrates with our backend solutions to provide captioning to phone call audio. Were also able to provide a custom Android app that we provide. But the current main method of choice has been to use that backend integration. What that means is a lot of the security concerns are also addressed immediately because the calls actually go through the same telephone networks as a hearing inmate would make as well. And so the same. Same security procedures, the monitoring that happens in a correctional facility for any call would apply here as well. And what’s actually really interesting is over the last five years, Android tablets have been rolled out across many prisons across the country. Because during the pandemic they had to pause in person visitations. And so because of that because of social distancing and because of that they actually introduced video calling in prisons for the first time. And through that process, hundreds of thousands of Android tablets were actually distributed all around the country in these environments. And so now we’re actually able to offer different, new modern technologies that can address different communication needs. And so with that introduction we launched InnoCaption Connect as a pilot last summer with one of the largest telcos in the industry. And we’re now in facilities across 10 states and we provide captioning for over 1000 calls a week specifically for folks in correctional facilities. And because our captioning here is also provided by the FCC through their funding, we don’t charge any additional fees to the end inmates that are using our service. I love that. That sounds like such a great extension of your mission and your product into another group of people who really can benefit. So thank you for that. Yep. So switching gears a little bit, I did another episode of this Week in hearing with Dr. Barbara Weinstein. And I know you and she and others in your company have worked on a white paper together. And I love the title. It’s called ‘Frustrated and Discouraged to Confident and Content’. And everybody wants to make that transition. But the paper talks about how important high quality captions are for lowering stress levels for people with hearing loss when they’re using the phone. So why do you think that is? And can you talk a little bit more about that white paper from your perspective? Sure, sure. Yes. It was a really interesting white paper and it was a pleasure working with Dr. Weinstein, I have to say. She is such a well versed and experienced academic in her field. This survey was one where we basically took new InnoCaption users, gave them a pre survey just as they were getting introduced to the service about their experience with phone calls before using the app. And then three months later we basically asked them many of the same questions to see what the change was. What we found was that new InnoCaption users reported a 55% decrease in listening fatigue when they used InnoCaption to make calls. That was a really, really cool number to see from our side. Very motivating at the end of the day, in terms of the quantifiable impact we were able to make. And for context about 86% of users in the survey used hearing aids or cochlear implants. So for most of our users, they are not just reading the text, they are actually actively listening to the audio as well, oftentimes with their phones connected via Bluetooth to their assistive device. And so by having the support of the captions, our users are able to process the speech using both the visual and sound based input, which leads to less fatigue in the long run. Another interesting finding that came from the white paper that’s alluded to in the title that you talked about was that these functional benefits around decreasing fatigue and effort they also really led to emotional benefits to our users. And so when we asked them how they felt when making phone calls before using InnoCaption in terms of choice of various different emotions, the ones that came to the top were frustration, stress, anxiety. They were the majority of responses. And then after using InnoCaption, we saw those same questions or the answers to flip. And so the top ones came to be confident, happy and content because they felt like they had the access and support they needed to be able to independently make these calls. And so we had always heard a lot of anecdotal feedback, you know, customer interactions or social media posts or app store reviews. But this, seeing this kind of hard data was, was really powerful and validating for our team. Yeah, and like you said, probably very motivating as well for the team. Right. To see that everything you’re spending your time on and all the choices that you made, you know, personally and professionally, really having a payoff. So that’s terrific to see. Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to ask you about some, just broader industry trends because there are a lot of big tech companies that are getting into the captioning business on telephone calls, you know, for example, Apple now you can have captions on FaceTime and there’s auto captioning also on Android phones. And so what really sets InnoCaption apart from some of these other options that are already built into people’s phones? Yeah, great question. And it’s one that comes up very often. We are really happy to see that more accessibility features are being built in natively to the operating systems. It’s been really, really needed. And a lot of times these services also mean that you can get accessibility for things that you couldn’t before at all, outside of phone calls too. Like YouTube videos or other channels as well. So we really, really are encouraged to see that this is becoming more front and center. We also find actually that many people find out about those built in features like Apple’s live captions, and then they end up searching for something more advanced and that’s when they find us as well. And so I think where we see things is it’s nice to have those basic level of features built in and then if you need something more advanced, come and try our solution as well. And what sets us apart from the native features is the fact that we offer the dual caption mode. So AI based or human based, we also have a lot of other ancillary features like the ability to view all of your past transcripts. I think a lot of people with a hearing loss find that really helpful because it’s really hard to take notes while you’re also listening and reading captions at the same time on a phone call. So if you have a long business call for instance, and you want to be able to jot down notes, that can be very difficult to do. But by having the transcripts available afterwards, our users really can look back and see if there’s anything they missed as well. And then lastly, customer support. We do have an amazing customer support team and it’s something that’s often overlooked, but many of our App Store reviews rave about our support team interactions and how much they were willing to go above and beyond to help our user community with their accessibility needs. And that’s probably not something you’ll be able to get from the likes of an Apple or a Google. And so that’s where I think we really differentiate ourselves as a specialist in this area. And then finally I would also mention that we are bound by FCC privacy and security regulations because of the funding that we receive. And that is also something that differentiates us from a Google or Apple, which aren’t bound by any regulations when it comes to the type of accessibility services that they offer. I would also say that big tech getting more active in the speech recognition field is something that’s been actually really helpful for us frankly too because that’s been something where automated speech recognition technology has actually improved dramatically over the last five years. When we started our service in 2016, all of our captioning was done by live stenographers and it was only because the technology really got better over the last three or four years that we were able to offer the AI based captioning and See more adoption on that side too, which actually just lets us help more and more people. Theres actually very, very strong, stable demand for our human captioners as well. But we keep growing our user base. And as more people are able to use AI captions for some of their calls it helps us meet everyone’s needs at the same time, even while we grow. Yeah, people are just more aware of the opportunity to have captioning with these big companies getting into it. And I think the more that people get used to using captioning the more they’re going to expect to find that in other locations as well. And so hopefully that improves overall access for people even when they’re not on the phone, but when they’re, you know, at other venues as well. So. I totally agree. And I think that’s one where myself as well, I don’t have significant hearing loss, but I now watch TV and movies with closed captioning on for most of the time. Because I actually find that even these white paper studies and the whole reduction of fatigue, I realized that’s actually the same kind of thing, maybe at a lesser extent, but when I hear a lot of background noise or different things, I also find it very hard to keep up with the dialogue. And so it really did let me empathize a bit better with our user community and their needs as well, as I went through those experiences too, of seeing more and more captions available everywhere we go now. Yeah, absolutely. So as we’re wrapping up here, just anything you can tell us about what’s next for InnoCaption? Sure. So over the next three to five years, our goal as a company is to provide better communications, access to more people in more settings. And so I think a good first step into that was our InnoCaption Connect announcement where we’re now entering the prison telecommunications services market as well and providing accessibility there. I think the next area of focus for us is going to be workplace accessibility. So we have a lot of companies and employers reaching out to us saying, you know, we have employees that have, that have hearing loss. Many of them are your user, are our users. And they say they ask us if there’s accommodations, technologies that we can help provide in a workplace setting as well. So we’ve been hard at work in developing new technologies that can address these needs as well. And in the coming months, we’re hoping to be able to make another public announcement on some of those developments too, and hopefully make an even greater impact for our community. Yeah, that’s terrific. That would be life changing for many, many people in the workplace. So looking forward to that exciting news when it’s available. You so much, Paul for being on the podcast today and sharing these exciting updates. And if anyone wants to learn more about InnoCaption, they can visit innocaption.com so thanks so much for being here. Thank you very much for having me and for allowing me to share my personal and our innocaption story. Thank you, Sheri. Absolutely.