I played around with some settings today and might have a solution. I'm going to try it out on a real webinar tomorrow,
For this test (real webinar with over 100 attendees.) I set the PowerPoint to use the laptop computer's (Dell Latitude) built in microphone and set the GoToWebinar to use the external microphone. This means the computer via PowerPoint uses the internal microphone to collect sound to be translated into the closed captions.
The Dell was connected to a projector via HDMI cable, so the speakers in the projector were sending sound to the 4 people who were in the physical room. The Dell computer was right next to the projector, so the Dell microphone should have easily captured the sound coming out of the projector., The external microphone is about 2 feet behind the projector, but the sound is turned up loud enough on the speakers so that the person sitting on the other side of the external microphone could hear everything clearly.
So in this case, the PowerPoint was able to hear and post the closed captions for the virtual presenters, but it was a bad translation. About a third of the words were missed or translated wrong. There were about six virtual presenters, and all of them had the same poor closed caption experience.
I was sitting in front of both the Dell and the external microphone. About half of my words were translated correctly. The person sitting next to me (close to the external mic, but now about 2 feet from the Dell mic) their words were not picked up a at all, as were others sitting around the same table.
In the past, we have used Macintosh computers and have had excellent closed caption translation for all in the physical room as well as all of the virtual presenters.
A few months ago, I worked with a colleague who is using a windows laptop computer with an external microphone that was right next to her speakers. During a GoToWebinar we could not get any of the virtual presenters words to show up on the screen.
Has anyone had a successful experience using a Windows computer, closed captions through PowerPoint working for virtual presenters?
It sounds like this may be the result of a poor external microphone. Are you able to test with a different PC or an external mic?
This exact same setup with external microphone and speakers works flawlessly on a Macintosh computer.
I'm using a $400 AKG professional microphone running through a Shure x2u to convert to USB.
This has been tried on two different Windows computers with the same poor results.
I'm hoping there is some secret check box deep in the Windows settings that will make this work.
