Hey Students!!
We’re doing a lot of class recording these days, but many of you probably don’t know about one of the most powerful features of the Panopto video viewer.
Panopto uses a technology called ASR – aka Automatic Speech Recognition – to convert the audio of a recording into text that can be searched. While it’s not always 100% accurate (much like the voice-to-text feature sometimes fails when you’re dictating a message on your iPhone), it does a pretty good job of indexing most words that are spoken during a lecture.
Why might this interest you?
Have you ever wanted to skip to the part of the class recording where your professor talked about a specific term or topic? There’s a really easy way to do that!
In the screenshots below (taken from Prof. Skalbeck’s Copyright class, with his permission), I typed in the important term “fixation” into the search box. Panopto then generates an index of all the instances where the term “fixation” shows up in Prof. Skalbeck’s Copyright lecture.
Panopto’s background process of converting audio to text via ASR automatically makes the recording searchable for specific terms. This could really be a game-changer for students, and when I realized how few people know about this feature, I figured it was time to write this blog post.
But wait, there’s more! Panopto also uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify search terms as they appear in Powerpoint slides, or any other text that’s found in the screen capture.
Once you’ve run the search for your term or phrase, you can click on each instance the term appears (in the Results column below the video window) to make the player jump directly to that moment in the recording. How cool is that?
Here’s Panopto’s more concise article on this topic – specifically, part 2 of the article found here:
https://support.panopto.com/s/article/How-to-Use-Video-Search
Also, don’t forget : you can access all of the lectures that professors have shared with you by going to http://urcapture.hosted.panopto.com and entering your netid and password.
Good luck with all your classes, and if you have any questions, you can contact me, Carl Hamm, at chamm @ richmond dot edu
As shown, if I click on any of the sentences listed on the left, the playback marker will jump to that exact spot on the timeline so you can listen to that part of the lecture immediately.
