Case Study: Scaling Live Captioning with On‑Prem Connectors and Batch AI

Case Study: Scaling Live Captioning with On‑Prem Connectors and Batch AI

Hook: Captions are table stakes, but accurate and private captioning at scale is hard. This case study shows how a mid-size platform used on-prem connectors and batch AI to scale captioning, cut costs, and satisfy enterprise customers.

The Problem

The platform needed high-accuracy captions for regulated content and wanted to avoid sending sensitive audio to third-party cloud services. Real-time engines were inconsistent and expensive at scale.

Solution Overview

They built a hybrid pipeline:

1. Low-latency, approximate real-time captions for live UX (on-device/lightweight models).
2. Nightly batch AI jobs for high-accuracy captions and redaction, running on an on-prem connector for regulated clients.
3. Post-processing to align high-accuracy captions with live timestamps and publish after approval.

Why This Worked

• Privacy: Sensitive audio for regulated clients never left the client network thanks to on-prem connectors (DocScan Cloud on-prem connector).
• Cost: Batch scheduling enabled cheaper commodity compute to process large backlogs at scheduled times.
• Quality: Human-in-the-loop checks for flagged segments improved final accuracy.

Operational Playbook

1. Tag each stream with compliance flags at ingest.
2. Spin up localized batch workers for clients requiring on-prem processing.
3. Integrate a simple editor UI for caption review and approval.
4. Measure cost-per-minute and track it against SLAs; use dev-oriented observability to expose those numbers to engineering and product (beneficial.cloud).

Results

• 40% reduction in captioning egress costs for regulated clients.
• 2x improvement in final caption accuracy after batch passes and human review.
• New enterprise contracts that required on-prem processing were won because the platform could meet data residency requirements.

Lessons Learned

• Design for graceful rollbacks: if batch jobs fail, the live low-latency captions should remain functional.
• Automate cost attribution so teams understand which clients drive the most spend and can negotiate pricing accordingly (whites.cloud case study).
• Use developer-centric cost tools and telemetry to avoid surprises and to optimize batching windows (beneficial.cloud).

Priorities When Implementing

1. Map which clients require on-prem vs cloud processing.
2. Deploy a simple approval workflow for high-accuracy captions.
3. Track SLAs and cost-per-minute for each customer segment.

Closing Thoughts

This hybrid approach balances privacy, quality, and cost. The market is moving toward hybrid models supported by batch AI and connectors — a trend reinforced by recent platform announcements about batch AI and on-prem integration (docscan.cloud). For teams focused on cost and efficiency, study case studies on query spend reduction and adopt developer-friendly observability tools (whites.cloud, beneficial.cloud).