Competition is growing in the field of captioned voice communications. I already knew about CapTel, which is a telephone captioning service using a phone device. I just learned about the existence of PhoneCaption.
PhoneCaption's website says that they can support IP calls. Captions are transmitted over the internet or IP phone. If I am interpreting that correctly, it means they can caption Voice Over IP Calls (VOIP). Exploring the CapTel website further, I found that in addition to a CapTel phone, they also offer a service called WebCapTel, which is basically the same thing as PhoneCaption.
According to PhoneCaption's About Us page, they are pretty new! They were just approved in January 2009 to provide Internet Protocol Caption Telephone Service (IPCTS). That's the formal term for captioned voice communications. They also offer a text relay service, and will have a video relay service too.
I have no experience with either CapTel or PhoneCaption. My speech probably is not good enough for me to use either one, but this would be great for hard of hearing people and deaf people with good speech. Anyone out there who can tell what their experience has been like with either one? Are there other captioned voice communications providers out there that I do not know about yet? It looks like this is going to be the next growth area in relay service provision, and I'm betting there are relay service providers already providing the IPCTS service but I don't know about it yet.
