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Signals
Signals

Signals allow you to remotely control your CaptionKit dashboard or app. You can use signals to start and stop captions, set the language, control caption visibility and more.

James Hunt avatar
Written by James Hunt
Updated this week

Before you get started make sure to create an API key in your CaptionKit dashboard and read up on the API authentication.

Signal types

  • captions:stream:start - Start streaming captions

  • captions:stream:stop - Stop streaming captions

  • captions:stream:clear - Clear caption text

  • captions:pending:on - Turn on "Starting soon" message

  • captions:pending:off - Turn off "Starting soon" message

  • captions:visibility:hide - Temporarily hide captions

  • captions:visibility:show - Show captions

  • language:select - Set transcription language

Get ready to receive signals

To receive signals in your CaptionKit dashboard, toggle on the 📡 Signals button in the caption controls area.

Sending a signal

Signals can be sent using either a POST or GET request to the following URL:

https://api.captionkit.io/v2/signal

For the below examples, the API_KEY will be included in a query param, but this can also be included in the request headers.

GET /signal

Using curl

curl https://api.captionkit.io/v2/signal?key={API_KEY}&event=captions:stream:start

Using fetch in JS or Node

fetch( 'https://api.captionkit.io/v2/signal?key={API_KEY}&event=captions:stream:start');

POST /signal

Using curl

curl -X POST https://api.captionkit.io/v2/signal?key={API_KEY} -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"event":"captions:stream:start"}'

Using fetch in JS or Node

fetch('https://api.captionkit.io/v2/signal?key={API_KEY}', { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json', }, body: JSON.stringify({ event: 'captions:stream:start', }),});

Language selection

When using the language:select signal, you must include a value parameter in the request, with a validlanguage code. For example, to set the language to English, you would use the language code en.

The available language codes are:

  • en English

  • en-US English (US)

  • en-AU English (AU)

  • en-GB English (GB)

  • en-NZ English (NZ)

  • bg Bulgarian

  • cs Czech

  • da Danish

  • nl Dutch

  • fr French

  • fr-CA French (Canada)

  • de German

  • de-CH German (Switzerland)

  • el Greek

  • hi Hindi

  • hu Hungarian

  • id Indonesian

  • it Italian

  • ja Japanese

  • ko Korean

  • lt Lithuanian

  • ms Malay

  • no Norwegian

  • pl Polish

  • pt Portuguese

  • pt-BR Portuguese (Brazil)

  • ro Romanian

  • ru Russian

  • es Spanish

  • es-419 Spanish (Latin America)

  • sv Swedish

  • th Thai

  • tr Turkish

  • uk Ukrainian

  • vi Vietnamese

  • zh Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)

  • zh-TW Chinese (Mandarin, Traditional)

  • zh-HK Chinese (Cantonese, Traditional)

CaptionKit also supports a special multi language code, which is for bilingual English and Spanish speech.

Output only language codes

These languages are only available in the CaptionKit dashboard "translations" selection, but are listed here for reference:

  • ar Arabic

  • fa Farsi/Persian

  • ht Haitian Creole

  • rw Kinyarwanda

  • sw Swahili

Requesting new languages

If you don't see your language above, reach out to our support team! We are in the process of adding more languages and will prioritize requested languages first.

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