Transforming education with automatic speech recognition

The Company

Sparked in 2008 by two enterprising grad students, Instructure benefits millions of students and teachers worldwide, every single day.

Instructure is an EdTech 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.

Instructure has launched Canvas Studio (formerly Arc) which is an interactive, smart, easy to use video platform, turning content into conversation, connection and collaboration.

The Solution

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 Canvas Studio by adding captions to content at no additional cost. It is extremely expensive to add captions manually, and educational institutions need cost-effective solutions.

The Results

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.

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. Canvas Studio 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 optimize their content and communication and more effectively understand learner behavior.