Kaltura (Captioning) - Manually Requesting Machine Captions

The University of Wisconsin System (except for UW Madison) instance of Kaltura automatically provides machine generated captions at no charge for all videos added to Kaltura after December 1, 2021. For videos added to the UW System instance of Kaltura before this date or videos whose captions have been deleted, the video owner or co-editor can manually request that machine-generated captions be added.

Accuracy and Editing

Machine-generated captions are automatically applied to all Kaltura videos and typically achieve approximately 95% accuracy. Because automated captions do not meet federal accessibility standards on their own, video owners are responsible for reviewing and editing captions to ensure they are complete, accurate, and synchronized with the audio.

For more information on editing captions, see the Kaltura (Captioning) - Editing Captions guide.

NOTE: Machine generated captions are NOT available for videos added from YouTube are not available via Kaltura. If you would like Kaltura to create captions for a video linked from YouTube, professional captions will need to be ordered. Please contact your campus Canvas administrator for information on professional captions. 

Requesting Machine Captions

Here is how a video owner or co-editor can request machine-generated captions for a Kaltura video:
1) Go to Kaltura's "My Media"
1a) In Canvas, go to Canvas > Account > My Media. 
1b) In Mediaspace, go to Guest > Login, then [Your Name] > My Media.
Your Name, then My Media.
2) On the My Media list, check the box next to one or more videos you'd like to caption.
3) Click the Actions drop-down menu near the top right of the screen, then select Caption & Enrich.
Kaltura's Actions menu, with the "Caption and Enrich" option highlighted.
4) Under Order Captions, select:
  • Service: Machine
  • Source Media Language: English [or other language, as needed]
  • Feature: Captions.
Order Captions menu, with Service: Machine, Source Media Language: English, and Feature: Captions selected.
5) Click Submit.
The resulting screen will show you all of your previous captions requests for that video. You can get back to this Captions Requests screen by going to Actions > Caption & Enrich.
Captions Requests screen table with one Pending request.
6) The time needed for Kaltura to generate the captions may vary from several minutes to several hours. 
When the captions are ready, the "CC" button to turn on caption display will automatically appear in the video player anywhere that the video is embedded or posted (even existing embeds or shares). At this point, users watching the video will have the option to display the captions, with no further action from the video owner needed.
Kaltura video player showing the display of captions in a video. The Closed Caption button is hightlighted.
7) We recommend that the video owner or co-editor edit the new captions in order to improve their quality.

See Also


Keywords:
captioning, caption, kaltura, video, media, accessibility, 508, transcript
Doc ID:
114781
Owned by:
Thomas A. in UWSA DLE
Created:
2021-11-10
Updated:
2026-06-03
Sites:
UW Stout, UW System Administration DLE, UW-La Crosse