Only institution-level Administrators have access to this ASR option.

It is important to note that the feature described on this page applies only to automated transcripts generated through EchoVideo-provided transcription services; it does not apply to auto-ingested Zoom transcripts.

EchoVideo provides an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service through our partnership with Amazon Web Services. The ASR service sends media to the transcription provider to automatically create machine-generated transcriptions for video / audio media.

EchoVideo provides Transcription Settings configuration that allows you to:

• Configure Transcription Language Settings for the primary language spoken in the media being transcribed (this article)
• Auto Send ASR to Captions setting for automatically applying transcripts to the closed captions track for media being transcribed

Transcription Settings allow you to select the primary, global language for your transcriptions. Meaning if you know all (or most) of your institution's recordings will be in a specific language, you can identify that language as the one to use for transcriptions. All Sections can additionally be configured individually to use a language other than the primary, global language default for transcription. 

Some institutions may have the option to enable Automatic Language Detection. This is discussed in more detail in the section at the bottom of this page.

The language selected by default is English (US, UK, or AU / ANZ region-specific as appropriate). Administrators configure this setting at the institutional level, meaning it applies to all media sent for transcription.

This is not a translation setting. This setting simply identifies the language typically being used in the recordings. For example, French spoken in a primarily English-language class will look like gibberish in an English-language transcript. If you select French as the transcript language setting, French will be transcribed accurately. Any other language spoken will be transcribed as gibberish. These are machines and do not make language adjustments like humans do.

Identifying the primary language used in your recordings can help provide more accurate transcriptions of the speech. Furthermore, users can manually edit the transcriptions to clean up the segments that were not recognized by the automated transcript, and then push them to the closed captioning track. Alternatively, if your transcripts are normally fairly accurate, you can auto-send transcripts to the closed captioning track if they meet the configured confidence score.

To configure language settings for automated transcripts

1. Log into EchoVideo as an administrator.
2. Click the Settings icon in the upper-right corner of the screen.
3. From the Settings menu, select Institution Settings.

   General settings appears and Basic Info is selected by default.

4. Click Features.
5. Scroll down to the Accessibility section of the page, shown in the figure below.
6. Click Update Settings, as shown in the figure above.
   

   The dialog box that appears contains a Default Language drop-down. It may also contain an Automatic Language Detection toggle, shown in the figure below and discussed later on this page.

   
7. Use the Default Language drop-down list to select the primary language to be used for all of your institution's media transcriptions.
8. If available, you can turn on the Automatic Language Detection toggle.
   

   If turned on, you do not need to select a Default Language from the drop-down list. This is discussed below.

9. When finished, click Save.

See Automatic Transcriptioning Service or ASR for additional details surrounding the transcription service. See Automatically Apply Automated Transcripts as Closed Captions for information on this feature. See Using the EchoVideo Transcript Editor for more information on editing transcripts in EchoVideo.

Using Automatic Language Detection

Some institutions will have an Automatic Language Detection toggle in the Transcription Settings modal. This is shown in the figure in the above procedure.

If turned on, EchoVideo tells the transcription service to automatically attempt to detect the primary language spoken in the audio of the media and provide the transcript in that language. You do not need to select a default language if you enable automatic language detection. Though it does no harm if you do.

Automatic language detection provides transcripts only in languages supported by Transcribe, which are listed in the following article: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/transcribe/latest/dg/what-is-transcribe.html.

If the language you want is not supported by Transcribe, do not turn on this toggle, and instead select the language from the Default Language selection list.

It is important to note that auto-language detection for transcriptions is an all-or-nothing prospect; each transcript will be provided in one and only one language (the language used in the majority of the speech). If the media is 70% Spanish and 30% English, the transcript will be provided in Spanish, with the Spanish speech transcribed as accurately as possible. The English portions will be mostly gibberish, with low-confidence (machine-driven) guesses as to 'What Spanish word is being spoken here?' This feature is not designed for mixed-language classes and may not provide useful transcripts in those cases.