A multimillion-dollar system capable of generating captions in real time will be added to the Legislative Council's broadcasting services, council president Andrew Leung said on Wednesday.

Leung said the AI-powered system, which cost HK$22 million, is highly accurate and that it will be rolled out this month.

“The accuracy, with hardware and software, is about 96 percent, which is among one of the best [transcribing] systems in the world," Leung said.

"Together at the back, we have two members from the secretariat correcting, if there are any mistakes,” he said.

Leung added the council has put the system through a lot of training, including 400 hours of voice transcription, involving more than 250 million words.

He said there is currently a 19-second delay between when someone speaks and when the caption appears, and that the goal is to shorten that to 15 seconds by the time the system is rolled out.

After its adoption, meeting minutes will be available on the Legco website within six working days, a vast improvement from the current wait time of one month.

Leung said the next phase is to incorporate real-time translation and interpretation elements so that viewers can follow meetings without any language barriers.