This is a great article and being deaf myself, I have very similar experiences. Some thoughts...
I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams.
I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it.
Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly.
A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to.
Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions.
I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.
I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams.
I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it.
Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly.
A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to.
Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions.
I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.