FCC Conditionally Approves Compensation for IP Relay Offerings
The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau in separate orders this week conditionally certified Nagish and InnoCaption to receive compensation from the interstate telecommunications relay services fund for providing IP relay service. However, the companies must demonstrate that their service…
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“meets or exceeds” the commission’s minimum TRS standards. The authorizations run through Dec. 23, 2026, “or the date of grant or denial of full certification, whichever occurs earlier,” the orders said. “Nagish proposes to provide IP Relay on a fully automatic basis, i.e., using text-to-speech technology to deliver the IP Relay users’ communications to hearing call participants and using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to deliver hearing parties’ communications to IP Relay users, without any reliance on communications assistants (CAs),” the bureau said: “Nagish states that it has contracts with various vendors to render speech into text using ASR and can incorporate new ASR vendors as needed.” InnoCaption “proposes to provide IP Relay using either ASR-only or human stenographers, at the IP Relay user’s option, to transcribe the other party’s communications for the IP Relay user,” said the second order. “InnoCaption additionally proposes to use a text-to-speech engine in lieu of a CA to relay the IP Relay user’s text communications to the hearing party.”