Waiting for the Words

Live Captions and the Turn to the Floor at Community Information Sessions

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities compares sixteen council community information sessions in six halls, half with automatic live captions projected beside the slides, across 612 transitions from presenter to floor. With captions on, the median gap before a resident spoke rose from 0.4 to 2.1 seconds and tracked the caption latency of the presenter's final word, overlap at transitions fell from 14.2 to 3.9 percent, and nearly one floor turn in five opened by reading the screen back, a third of them quoting a misrecognition the presenter repaired before answering.

@misc{slop_so5bip,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Ylva Onyekwere},
  title        = {Waiting for the Words: Live Captions and the Turn to the Floor at Community Information Sessions},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.so5bip},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-live-captions-projected-so5bip/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}