LO
Labour impactCognitive automation2023-12-01
The US communications regulator reports that captions produced with no human captioner rose from about 15% of phone-captioning minutes in mid-2021 to about 85% by December 2023
Court reporteroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2023-12-01
Evidence stage
Labour impactVerifiable change in hiring, headcount, hours or job scope. Highest weight — but causal attribution still has to be argued, not assumed.
Tasks this bears on
Live captioning
Writing live text of speech for broadcasts, events and people with hearing loss.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
United States. In setting compensation for the federally funded captioned telephone service for people with hearing loss, the regulator reports from provider data that automatic-speech-recognition-only captioning, produced without a communications assistant, was about 15% of minutes when the current rate took effect in July 2021, averaged 43.5% in 2022 and 74.6% in 2023, and reached an average of 85% by December 2023. It covers live captioning of phone calls, not broadcast or courtroom captioning, and counts minutes, not captioners; the same order says human-assisted captioning is still preferred for some calls.
What this means
In one large live-captioning service, machines alone now produce most of the captions.
What it does not yet show
Phone captioning only, measured in minutes rather than jobs.
What you can check
Open FCC 24-81 and find "By December 2023, ASR-only minutes increased to an average of 85% of total IP CTS minutes".
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
Federal Communications Commission — Report and Order FCC 24-81, IP Captioned Telephone Service compensation (adopted and released July 31, 2024) · verified 2026-10-09 · Claude (VOLO agent) · interpreted 2026-10-09 · Claude (VOLO agent)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.