How to run a captioned event with VolenScribe
From your first free credit to downloading the transcript afterwards — everything you need, in the order you'll need it.
Start with a credit
One credit runs one event. Your first one is on us.
Try it free before you commit
Every new account includes a free 15-minute test credit for up to 25 viewers — no card required. Run a quick test broadcast and make sure VolenScribe is the right fit for your event before you spend anything.
How credits work
- One credit unlocks one event. Pick a package sized for your event — from Meetup (3 hours, 100 viewers) to Conference (24 hours, 1,000 viewers).
- The hours are a budget of live minutes. The clock only runs while you're actually transcribing — pausing between talks, over lunch, or during breaks costs nothing.
- Viewer counts are a soft cap: sizing guidance, not a cut-off. Going slightly over won't end your broadcast.
- Add-ons are chosen at checkout: live translation (priced per language) and extra concurrent rooms on Half-Day packages and above.
Credits stay with their event
When you create an event, you assign one credit to it — and it stays there. Unused minutes don't roll over to your next event, so pick the package that fits before you buy.
Community pricing
Non-profits, community groups, student organisations, and educational institutions qualify for discounted community rates on every package — for example, a Full-Day event drops from €89 to €49. See the pricing page for details and how to get verified.
Create your event
Each event gets its own URL — volen.live/your-event — that attendees open to read live captions.
What you'll set up
Event name
Shown to attendees at the top of the viewer page. Something descriptive works best — "DevFest Ireland 2026" or "Company all-hands".
Custom URL slug
Your event lives at volen.live/your-slug. Pick a short, memorable slug, or leave it blank and we'll generate one.
Description
Shown to attendees — and fed straight to the transcription AI as vocabulary hints. Mention speaker names, product names, and topics for noticeably better accuracy.
Event logo
Optional. Personalises the viewer page. Any image up to 5MB; square formats look best.
Translation languages
If your credit includes the translation add-on, you choose the exact caption languages here — attendees pick their preferred one on the viewer page.
Workspace
Events belong to whichever workspace you're in — your personal account or a team. Switch in the top bar before creating if you mean to use a team credit.
Teach the AI with sessions
Sessions split your event into talks — and they're how you tell the AI what it's about to hear.
What sessions are
Think of sessions as the chapters of your event: each talk, panel, or Q&A gets one. Create as many as you need and switch between them live from the broadcast page as the day progresses. Transcripts stay organised by session, which makes the downloads afterwards much easier to work with.
"Opening keynote — Sarah Johnson", "Panel: Future of AI", "Q&A", "Closing remarks"
Session descriptions are the accuracy secret
Whatever you write in a session's description is passed directly to the AI as vocabulary hints for that talk — and the hints update live, even mid-broadcast.
Live transcription is very good, but it can't read minds. If a speaker says "Kubernetes", "Siobhán", or "gRPC" out of nowhere, the AI has to guess — and might hear "coobernetties" or "Shavawn". Tell it in advance what the talk covers and who's speaking, and it knows exactly what to listen for.
- Speaker names — especially unusual spellings or non-English names
- Technical terms, product names, and acronyms that'll come up
- Company and organisation names
- A sentence or two on the topic
- Industry jargon (medical, legal, academic terminology)
- Places, events, and project names that'll be referenced
"Talk by Siobhán O'Sullivan, Staff Engineer at Stripe, on scaling PostgreSQL and pgBouncer connection pooling. Covers WAL replication, logical decoding, Citus, and comparisons with CockroachDB and Amazon Aurora."
Pro tip: ask your speakers
A few days before the event, ask each speaker for a short blurb about their talk and drop it straight into the session description. Five minutes of prep, and a genuinely huge difference in caption accuracy for your attendees.
Go live
Broadcasting runs entirely in your browser — no software to install.
Starting your broadcast
- 1Open your event from the dashboard and head to its broadcast page
- 2Pick the session you're about to transcribe (or create one on the spot)
- 3Choose the spoken language — or leave it on Auto Detect and it recognises which language is being spoken
- 4Press Go live and allow microphone access when your browser asks
- 5Check the audio level meter to confirm your microphone is picking up sound
The clock only runs while you're live
Your credit's minutes are only consumed while transcription is actually running. Stop the broadcast during lunch and breaks — your remaining time is shown on the broadcast page, and paused time is never billed.
Best practices for quality captions
Things that hurt accuracy
- –Background noise and music near the microphone
- –Multiple people talking over each other
- –Very quiet or muffled audio
- –Flaky venue WiFi — have mobile data ready as a fallback
Captions on the big screen
For venues with video production, the overlay puts live captions straight into your video mix.
Using the overlay
Open volenscribe.com/overlay/your-event — a page that renders live captions over a chroma-key colour your video team keys out.
- Chroma key colours: green, blue, magenta, a custom colour, or fully transparent
- Adjustable font size, text colour, and caption background opacity
- Position captions top, centre, or bottom — and left, centre, or right
- Line limit controls so captions never swallow the screen
- Every setting lives in the URL — configure once, send the link to your AV team
Video production tips
- OBS Studio: add a Browser Source pointing at your overlay URL, then apply a Chroma Key filter.
- vMix: add a Web Browser input and use the built-in colour key.
- Wirecast: add a Web Page shot layer and apply the chroma key effect.
Work as a team
Running events with colleagues? Teams share credits and manage events together.
After the event
Your transcripts and analytics stick around when the captions stop.
Download transcripts
Download a single session or the whole event, in two formats:
- Plain text (.txt) — a readable transcript, organised by session. Great for blog posts, minutes, and speaker notes.
- JSON (.json) — structured data with timestamps and session info, for archiving or feeding into other tools.