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For Australians living with a hearing impairment, captions are crucial to everyday life.

And while captions have been commonplace on TV for decades, it’s been a slower process introducing them to other platforms outside of regular broadcasting.

This is precisely what Tony Abrahams noticed 17 years ago when he co-founded Ai-Media with his partner Alex Jones.

“I started the business with Alex Jones, who was my partner at the time, and Alex is profoundly deaf,” Abrahams explained. “So I had a direct experience of what it was like to live with someone who was profoundly deaf, but also his experience of not being able to go to university and study anything that he wanted.”

Jones decided to study acting in New York, but Abrahams said his options were still “very limited”.

“You can imagine trying to study when you have to look at an interpreter all day, and they’re just waving their hands and you can’t take notes — you can’t validate whether what they’re actually saying is correct,” he continued. “A lot of the time, they don’t know what the subject matter is either and it’s a really poor experience.”

Abrahams and Jones found a niche in the market that they realised they could capitalise on and, in turn, help countless people living with a hearing impairment beyond free-to-air television.

“We saw a business opportunity,” Abrahams stated. “I’d already completed my university studies when I started the business and had just done an MBA, and the very first thing that we did was pitch to Foxtel, which at the time didn’t have any captions.

“And it was a very simple proposition. There’s one in six people that have a hearing impairment in Australia and there’s one in four people that speak a language other than English at home. All of these groups watch TV with captions. If you want them to pay 100 bucks a month, you should [offer captions],” he said.

Since launching in 2003, Ai-Media has been working tirelessly to expand its services to real-life situations that can further a person who’s living with a hearing impairment’s experience.

“Now, it’s actually not broadcast. Notwithstanding that we do all the captioning for Channel Nine, Channel Seven and Foxtel, there’s a lot more University lectures and corporate meetings than there are TV shows, and that’s also where we’re focused on growing our impact.”

Abrahams noted that the method of “human curation” was implemented to improve live-caption accuracy for the workplace and education institutes.

“At UNSW Sydney, we provide support for all of the deaf and hard of hearing students there, and what you need there is effectively 99%-plus accuracy,” he admits.

“So what we do is we help to vastly simplify the task by having one person who’s actually speaking into a computer system consistently, and because it’s that one person, the computer gets used to the voiceprint, and we use the AI to improve the kind of tweaking to that unique particular voiceprint by continually training in any errors and correcting any errors.

“So it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a broad Scottish accent or an Australian accent — as long as you’re saying the same word the same way day-in day-out, the system learns and adapts to that.”

Since the pandemic has forced students to move online, Abrahams believes this has actually opened a lot of doors for those who use captions.

“What the pandemic has done is it’s opened up a greater market for the services from people that otherwise [would struggle in face-to-face classes]. The really difficult thing is, say you’re in a physical tutorial — how do you get the audio out of a tutorial room?

“You’ve got someone sitting at the back, you got someone sitting at the front, you got people cross-talking, you’ve got background noise. When everyone’s on Zoom or one of the other platforms, you can hear everyone really clearly. So it’s actually just a much better experience in terms of delivering accessibility when everyone’s online.”

Abrahams looks forward to when dual delivery of lectures and tutorials becomes the norm and students with impaired hearing have the same opportunities as others.

“In terms of prioritising accessibility, I think that that’s a really important thing to bear in mind…and making sure we don’t lose sight and just snap back to how things were in the past.”

For those curious as to how Abrahams became a co-founder and CEO of Ai-Media, he studied Commerce, switched to Accounting and received the University Medal at UNSW Sydney — the same university that now uses Ai-Media’s services.

If this has inspired you to follow in Abrahams’ footsteps, you can take our questionnaire below, which will align your mission with the degrees that will set you on the right path.

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