Semiautomated relay method and apparatus

A captioning system for presenting captions to an assisted user (AU) during communication with a hearing user (HU) where the hearing user uses a hearing user's device to facilitate the communication, the system comprising:

• a captioned device including a display screen, a speaker, and a microphone, the microphone for receiving the AU voice signal for transmission to the HU's device, the display screen for presenting captions corresponding to an HU voice signal, and the speaker for broadcasting the hearing user's voice signals;
• a processor specially programmed to receive voice signal during an ongoing call between the AU and the HU and, during the ongoing call;
• (i) run an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine to generate initial ASR captions associated with the voice signal;
• (ii) automatically assessing at least one caption quality factor associated with prior initial ASR captions generated during the ongoing call;
• (iii) delaying broadcast of HU voice signal to the AU via the speaker;
• and
• (iv) providing the ASR captions to the AU device for display on the display screen;
• (v) based on the at least one caption quality factor, automatically adjusting a duration of the HU voice signal broadcast delay to better temporally align the HU voice signal broadcast via the speaker with the captions presented via the display screen.