Only institution-level Administrators have access to this ASR option.
Note that the feature described on this page applies only to automated transcripts generated by EchoVideo-provided transcription services; it does not apply to auto-ingested Zoom transcripts.

EchoVideo has partnered with several transcription service providers to offer automatic speech recognition (ASR) services. The ASR service sends media to the transcription provider to automatically generate machine-transcriptions for video / audio content. 

EchoVideo provides an ASR Settings configuration that allows you to:

• Configure ASR Language Settings to identify the primary language spoken in the media being transcribed, or to set auto-detection of the primary language.
• Auto Send ASR to Captions setting for automatically applying transcripts to the closed captions track for media being transcribed (this article).

The Auto Send ASR to Captions option allows you to tell EchoVideo to automatically push the media transcript to the closed captioning track if it meets the confidence score threshold you set. Typically, closed captions are more accurate than media transcriptions, where the transcripts are determined to be very accurate, there is no reason not to use them as closed captions.

EchoVideo has supported manually pushing transcripts to closed captions, but this feature lets administrators enable automatic transcription.

Because some transcripts are less accurate than others, and because accuracy matters for accessibility, the auto-push feature uses a confidence-score threshold set by administrators. This threshold must be met or exceeded before the auto-push happens.

If the media already has a captioning track, the auto-push feature will not override the existing captions. Replacing those will have to be done manually, likely through the EchoVideo Transcript Editor. If the media receives closed captions from a captioning provider after it has already generated captions from a transcript, the provider's captions will be applied to the media.

The section at the bottom of this page provides more details on what a confidence score is and what it means.

Note
Enabling this feature or changing the confidence score does not back-apply the feature to media with existing transcripts. Only transcripts received after turning on / changing these settings will be subject to your configuration. In addition, as noted above, if the media already has a closed captions track, regardless of how it got there, this feature will not replace it with transcripts. Those media must have CC tracks replaced manually if desired.

To configure automated closed captions from transcripts

1. Log in to 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 from the middle panel.
5. Scroll down to the Accessibility section of the page, shown in the figure below.
   

6. Click Update Settings under Transcription Settings shown in the figure above.

   The Transcription Settings modal opens. For more information on setting up Transcription Language Settings, see EchoVideo: Configuring Transcription Language Settings. 

7. Toggle on Auto Push Transcript to the Closed Caption Track, as shown in the figure below.

   

   Turning on the toggle activates the confidence score field as shown in the figure above.

8. Change (or accept the default) Required Confidence Level Percentage for automatic push to closed captions. The default is 95%. See the section below for more information about confidence scores.
9. When finished, click Save.

All transcripts received from this point forward will automatically be pushed to the closed captioning track if the transcript provider's overall confidence score meets or exceeds the percentage set in these settings. This change will not be back-applied to any media that already has automated transcripts. Furthermore, if the media already has closed captions (regardless of how they got there), those will not be replaced by auto-generated transcripts. 

See Automatic Transcriptioning Service or ASR for additional details surrounding the transcription service. See Enable/Disable Closed Captioning for more information on disabling (at least temporarily) your Closed Captioning service if appropriate.

What Does the Confidence Score Mean?

In machine-generated transcriptions, each word is assigned a confidence score based on how certain the machine program is that it was correct. Lower confidence often indicates speech that was garbled, difficult to understand, or quieter; alternatively, it may not have been interpreted properly by the automated program. The scores are presented as percentages and thus range from 0 to 100.

Each word in the transcript has a score. The Confidence score used for the auto-push-to-closed-captions setting is the average of the total score across the entire transcript. If you set the feature's confidence threshold to 90%, the overall average score across all words in the transcript must be at least 90%. Meaning that there may be transcribed words or sections of the media that are lower than that, but that the majority of the words in the returned transcript have been determined to be accurate.

Keep in mind that the score for the transcript elements is provided by the same program that transcribed it. There is no guarantee that the assessment is fully valid, though it is often close. You may find that if a word is used repeatedly but transcribed incorrectly (e.g., a close substitute), the program may assign a high confidence score to that term because it is used consistently. This is common when the transcript is in American English, but the speaker is British: the transcription program may not transcribe the word correctly, but it renders it consistently.

What you may want to do is to spend time reviewing auto-applied closed captions from transcripts, to determine if those normally returned are accurate enough for this use. At that point, you may want to set the confidence threshold for the auto-push feature high enough that only very good transcripts are used as closed captions. Others can be manually edited, and once verified, pushed to the closed captioning track. In fact, if the transcripts you receive are generally good enough, you can still have the transcripts applied as closed captions, have the transcripts edited for further accuracy, and then manually re-pushed to the closed captioning track.