MEDIATEX-TASF is a recent development undertaken for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's French network by a joint effort from Canadian Workplace Automation Research Centre and IBM-France Scientific Center. This system generates real-time captions during live broadcast by using an experienced stenotypist who is connected to an automatic computer-based transcription system. Real-time closed captioning for hearing-impaired television viewers has been available in English for 10 years, but until now, none were for French-speaking users.

MEDIATEX-TASF adapts the core technology developed by IBM-France (TASF) to the numerous constraints of live operation for providing high quality captioning. Three major improvements were carried out: adaptation of Grandjean method, introduction of specific dictionaries containing more than 6,000 expressions to complement the basic TASF lexicon and post-processing by 500 rules solving lexical problems as well as verb conjugation and word agreement in gender and number. The error rate of MEDIATEX-TASF is now reaching 5%, which could be sufficient for a commercial usage. First on-the-air tests will occur next September in Montreal.