Case Study: Pacers Sports & Entertainment achieves real-time live arena captioning with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry

Pacers Sports & Entertainment cuts caption error rate to 1.14% with Microsoft

Pacers Sports & Entertainment (PS&E) needed to create a custom, live-game captioning system to make its basketball games accessible for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and non-English-speaking fans. The challenge was to deliver instantaneous, accurate captions that could keep up with the fast pace of live announcers and specialized game lingo. To solve this, they partnered with Microsoft Corporation and used Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Speech to develop a solution.

Microsoft's solution involved using Azure AI Foundry to train custom speech models tailored to basketball commentary, which were then delivered in real-time via Azure Functions. This implementation drastically reduced the caption error rate to just 1.14% and cut model training time by 99.97%. The result is a live captioning service for arena screens and mobile apps that has set a new standard for accessibility and fan experience.