Auto Captioning Videos in Panopto

Panopto is our video streaming and lecture capture software that allows you to record audio, video, and your computer screen to create educational videos. It also has an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captioning feature that may help with creating captions for videos. It may not be the perfect tool for every captioning job, but this feature allows many users to caption their videos with ease.

Panopto’s first pass at ASR captioning is still less than ideal, so you should proofread the captions and edit them as needed. If the editing job is very large (because the video is extremely long, and/or the automatically-produced captions are extremely inaccurate), Panopto might not be the right tool for the job. If that’s the case, be sure to contact ITS by emailing support@swarthmore.edu so we can discuss different options for you.

Panopto has a robust support page with up to date documentation. Please follow the instructions from the links below to set up auto-captions in Panopto.

Panopto uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically generate captions. Sometimes the AI engine does not have the necessary vocabulary to accurately convert the spoken words into text. We find this issue most often in courses with specialized jargon (e.g. STEM courses).

If you find this to be the case with your video, please reach out to accessibility@swarthmore.edu. We will set you up with an alternate captioner to improve accuracy.