The captioning service is run by the National Relay Service (NRS). NRS is a government initiative that offers a wide variety of services to help people who have hearing and/or speech impairments to make and receive calls. This enabled you to read what the other person was saying. The text was sent to your phone via your Internet connection, and appeared on a small screen built into the phone. The officer would re-read what he thought he heard into a computer (adding a delay) and then, using his keyboard, the officer would attempt to correct anything that was mis-heard or mis-captioned (adding another delay). The captioning service would transcribe your friend’s voice into text, using a human relay officer, sometimes called a relay agent. The phone would also connect you to the domestic captioning service, via the Internet. The phone would connect you to your friend so that you could talk, just like using a traditional phone. To call a friend from your phone, you would first press a Captions button to enable captioning, then dial your friend’s number.

The CapTel® captioning phone worked in a similar way to a regular phone but added live captioning, sometimes known as transcription, subtitles, or voice-to-text.

Caption phone service