Disclaimer message for videos that use Automatic Machine Captioning Provider

Bob Eastman

Enabling ASR captions for all videos at the folder level is a great, new feature. My organization would love to use this, but after speaking with our accommodations office, we were told that these captions may be better delivered with a disclaimer informing viewers that the captions are not ADA compliant.

Of course, instructors could easily find a way to notify their students of this on their own. But, we think it would be beneficial if a system setting could be added to allow for a customizable disclaimer message. This message could allow for anything related to captions; though, we would use it to explain that the captions are machine generated and the accuracy is low.

From Michael Espey: We need to have some sort of identification that a caption track is coming from ASR at a glance, and in my mind, this should exist in three locations:

1. In the viewer/embed player, when selecting a caption track, the language title should have "(ASR)" appended to it if it originated from an ASR service.
2. In the session list, there should be some sort of identification that a session has ASR CC vs. Pro CC (including uploaded CC).
3. In the "Captions" tab of the session settings, there should be some indication that the track was generated with ASR
   • This interface should identify if the captions have been edited, by whom, and when that happened last.
   • I would also like to see an estimated confidence value provided here. I know that Speechmatics provides confidence for their transcripts, exposing these to us would be appreciated.

Michael Espey

We need to have some sort of identification that a caption track is coming from ASR at a glance, and in my mind, this should exist in three locations:

1. In the viewer/embed player, when selecting a caption track, the language title should have "(ASR)" appended to it if it originated from an ASR service.
2. In the session list, there should be some sort of identification that a session has ASR CC vs. Pro CC (including uploaded CC).
3. In the "Captions" tab of the session settings, there should be some indication that the track was generated with ASR
   • This interface should identify if the captions have been edited, by whom, and when that happened last.
   • I would also like to see an estimated confidence value provided here. I know that Speechmatics provides confidence for their transcripts, exposing these to us would be appreciated.

Elba Rios

Excellent feature request. It's important for viewers to be aware for the reliability and accountability. The nuances of word sounds and spelling is detrimental, especially in the health sciences -- ex: medical prescriptions where choices are life and death decisions.

claire bowmer

Interesting idea. There is the copyright notice option but sounds like this would detect if there were captions to automatically add the message.

Tom Lynch

Also the copyright notice is kind of burdensome to have to wait for it to go away, when you could put a banner under the video only if captions are on and it's automatic.

claire bowmer

I very much agree @Tom Lynch it would benefit the copyright notices as well to have a banner feature.

Deborah Fitchett

We're currently using the copyright notice option as a temporary hack, but it's not ideal because the logic for when the copyright notice displays isn't identical to the logic for when automatic captions exist, so sometimes it'll display when there are no captions or when captions have been edited manually.

One idea I thought of last night would be: when configuring caption services, we could edit an optional "caption credits" text field. If left blank nothing happens. If text is entered (eg "Captions auto-generated by Panopto and not ADA compliant") then when the captions are created this text would be automatically added as the first caption in the video. If video creators then edit the captions they could edit the credits too.

Downsides of this approach would be that the text wouldn't be added or edited retrospectively to pre-existing videos. Also if there are videos where speech/captions start at 0:00 then there's no space for the credits unless it's merged up with the first true captions.

So the banner approach Tom suggests is probably better. But it would be a useful bonus, in the case that someone edits the automatic captions to make them accurate, if there was a way to manually remove the banner for that individual video.

Gemma Sinclair

We are also being asked about this as we need to remind students every time that the captions are automatically generated.

I would like to see a disclaimer at the start of the captions e.g. [CAPTIONS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED] before the transcript both in Closed Captions and in the Captions tab on the video.

We are planning to include in Copyright message and all comms but that's not enough. Staff and Student Council members gave this feedback.

Carlos Coronel

This could be a good idea!

Sebastian Pope

Viewers should really be able to see easily that caption have been auto-generated.

I feel like this should be apparent as there can be inaccuracies and viewers may want to question words or terms. On YouTube, captions have an "[auto-generated]" notification so you know that they may not be what is actually being said. The Panopto user-interface says (not 100% accurate) to Creators, but there's no such warning for viewers.

Gemma Sinclair

We continue to follow up with our Account Manager about this feature request (#FR-3931) since 2022. It's now 2 years later and there has been no progress when we have seen videos on social media have been including this for multiple years.