Instructure is providing the best automatic captioning for education using Speechmatics technology

Instructure is an educational software company, whose goal is to make people smarter and make teaching and learning easier, with more than 3,000 universities, school districts and institutions around the world using its software.

During the last few years, when it has become increasingly crucial to focus on self-development and to strive to achieve more than ever before, the e-learning market has grown at an unprecedented rate. With LinkedIn making an e-learning company their biggest acquisition to date, and recognizing that the majority of professionals go to LinkedIn to learn and enhance their careers by consuming content related to their industries, the market has rapidly grown in value.

Instructure has launched a new product, Arc, which is an interactive, smart, easy to use video platform, turning content into conversation, connection and collaboration. Recognizing both the need for accessible content and the legal and moral obligation to make all content accessible in the USA, Instructure looked to Speechmatics to provide automatic speech recognition technology for adding captions to video content. Crucially, Instructure was looking for a provider of accurate speech-to-text transcription to integrate into Arc by adding captions to content at no additional cost. It is extremely expensive to add captions manually, and educational institutions need cost-effective solutions. Instructure found Speechmatics to be at least 10% more accurate in every test set and to make at least 40% fewer mistakes than other leading automatic speech-to-text providers.

“Arc is designed to empower teachers and students to interact with each other through video. The tool makes learning collaborative and the addition of automatic captioning to video using Speechmatics technology has enabled us to expand our offering to our customer base. We compared Speechmatics technology to other automatic speech recognition technology providers but Speechmatics was by far the best—providing incredibly high levels of accuracy,”

says Gentry Davies, Director of Product Management at Instructure.

Not only does automatic captioning enable live content, it also creates captions for video content, ensuring users can view the videos and learn without the sound on whenever they need to.

Where a user is not familiar with an accent or dialect used in the video content, the technology encourages self-learning by enabling the user to read and listen at the same time. Arc also provides analytics with respect to what video users view, how long they view for and at what point they stop viewing, which allows instructors to optimise their content and communication and more effectively understand learner behaviour.