Accessibility Week Day 3 Recap: Meet Your Speech-to-Text Needs Without Breaking the Bank

Mary Kenny and Brian Luo, Product Managers at Rev, talk about Rev’s best-in-class speech-to-text products.

Key Webinar Slides

Webinar Transcript

Sara Ciskie: (00:04)
Well, hello everyone, and welcome to our third webinar as part of Rev’s first accessibility week. My name is Sara Ciskie, I’m Head of Customer Success here at Rev, and I’ll be helping facilitate the Q&A for this session. I’m here today with Mary Kenny and Brian Luo on our product team. We’re super excited to talk with you guys about meeting your speech-to-text needs. So how can you add captions to your content, while staying on budget and in a way that makes sense for your workflow? So, Brian, I’ll just have you go onto the next slide real quick for some housekeeping items before I turn it over to y’all. So first and foremost, everyone is in view only mode, so everyone’s aware, we can’t see or hear you. However, we do have a chat over to the side if people would like to engage with us and your fellow attendees, we will be keeping an eye on that as we go on.

Sara Ciskie: (00:53)
Secondly, super excited to announce that we do have live captions for this session. So to turn those on, just go to the lower right hand corner of the Zoom application, click that close caption button, and then click, “Show subtitle”, and you’ll see the closed captions pop on right there. We will be sending out the recording with human done closed captions along with the slides of the next couple of days, but we have this here for you guys in this Zoom session.

Sara Ciskie: (01:19)
And then lastly, we will be doing a Q&A at the end, so please post the questions in the Q&A section. It is just the three of us, so we’re going to do our best to get to everything, but really excited to answer any questions that you guys have. And so with that, Brian, Mary, I will turn it over to y’all.

Mary Kenny: (01:37)
Thank you so much for the introduction, Sarah, and thank you so much for all of our attendees for joining us today for this session. My name is Mary Kenny, and I’m a product manager here at Rev, overseeing our enterprise product offering. I spend a lot of time working with organizations to help integrate Rev into their transcription and captioning workflows. And today I’m also joined by my colleague, Brian Luo. Brian is also a product manager, and he is currently leading the launch of Rev’s newest service, live captions for Zoom, to make meetings and classes via Zoom, more comprehensible and engaging through realtime captions that you’ll see demoed throughout this webinar. So in the first half of this session, I’m going to talk about Rev’s captioning and transcription services and tools, a little bit about how schools are using them, and then in the second half, Brian will walk you through our new live captions offering for Zoom. Next slide please. Great. So first some brief background on Rev. In 2010 Rev’s founders set out to break the barriers around the physical workplace, and they identified a market where they could the shared skills of a large network of freelancers, and quickly learned that the voice market was ripe for innovation. Rev then built a marketplace offering remote speech-to-text jobs that provided both customers and freelancers a better experience. Specifically, Rev offers closed captioning, foreign subtitles, and transcription services, and our software enables freelancers to seamlessly transcribe, caption, and subtitle content, all in a simple interface. And with years of accurate transcription data, we were able to build an industry leading speech recognition engine to transcribe speech-to-text automatically. Our professional freelancers, advanced software, and proprietary artificial intelligence, really position us to offer exceptional accuracy and the fastest turnaround at the lowest prices. Rev has saved individuals and enterprises countless hours, and has fundamentally changed the way that their audio and video content is accessed, shared and utilized.

Mary Kenny: (04:08)
So, schools can benefit immensely from captioning and transcription, which both make content more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing students, and also benefit many types of learners. Well, closed captioning for education is crucial to prevent disability discrimination, and ensure ADA compliance, there are many additional benefits. One of which is that captions help all students better understand and focus on educational videos. Our integrations are designed to streamline the captioning process for our customers. We integrate with several leading video platforms, including Brightcove, Kaltura, YouTube, and Vimeo, which means that Rev can add finished captions to your videos automatically.

Mary Kenny: (04:55)
Our live captions on Zoom are another powerful educational tool. They can help maximize comprehension for students who are adjusting to this new virtual learning environment that we’re in, and also keep them engaged throughout the session.

Mary Kenny: (05:10)
Transcription is another really valuable tool that educators have at their disposal. The instructor-student dynamic is most effective when students are fully engaged in the class, and not frantically taking notes and trying to keep up. With the transcription service like Rev’s, a professor can give a lecture and then post the notes online afterwards, so students can review the material without needing to miss out on that in class experience. And for instructors, that means that you have more time to interact with your students, or spend time on research, plus transcripts from other sessions like discussion groups or one-on-one tutoring sessions can provide all students, especially those who are deaf or hard of hearing, with access to resources and course material. So just an overview of how Rev works. So first I’ll start with how you send your files to Rev. So there are three easy ways to send Rev your audio and video files. You can either upload files directly from your computer, you can share a public URL, like a Dropbox link or a YouTube video, or you can automate upload with our API Zapier or, one of several major online video platform integrations. And then after files are uploaded to Rev, we run audio through our automated speech recognition engine. And once complete, the files are reviewed by our professional transcriptionist and captioners. Any corrections or modifications that they make to the output are fed back to the speech engine through adaptive algorithms, so that our speech recognition can become more and more accurate over time. Our freelancers have the freedom to choose their work, set their own hours and work where they want. And AI boosts their productivity, both for the freelancers who can do more work in less time, and also for customers who can get their files back from Rev much faster.

Mary Kenny: (07:13)
Once the file has been reviewed and edited, it goes through a quality review process, where our team of reviewers work with the captioners and transcriptionists to ensure that the files are ready for delivery, and have achieved our 99% accuracy standards. The completed file is then delivered back to customers via your preferred delivery method. Be that an email notification, your Dropbox folder, or automatically pushing the captions to your online video platform. And really everything that we do here to serve our customers also helps us create more job opportunities in our freelancer marketplace, and really fulfill our mission of creating great work from home jobs powered by AI. So here on this next side, you’ll see our customer editors with the caption editor on the left, and the transcript editor on the right. And here at Rev, we believe that a transcript or caption file really should be an interactive product that fits into our customer’s workflows. So for us, that means building a suite of really powerful tools that will enable Rev’s customers to review, notate, and collaborate on transcription and caption orders. And the goal here is really to just extend our service beyond delivering a text file, and give customers useful tools that simplify their workflow, in one easy to access place.

Mary Kenny: (08:47)
And lastly, just a quick note on our packages. So Rev offers very transparent pricing for our captioning and transcription services. If your captioning or transcription needs have expanded, you can unlock discounts across your department or university with our Rev Pro package. And the Rev Pro package includes a dedicated Customer Success Manager who can guide you on which services best match your needs, reporting to help you monitor usage and spend across your teams, and also our priority support team, to ensure that any issues you encounter are addressed quickly. If you’re interested in learning more about our packages or want to discuss volume discounts, please let us know, we’re more than happy to discuss our options. And with that, I will turn the floor over to Brian who will be telling you more about our newest service, Rev Live Captions for Zoom.

Brian: (09:42)
Thanks so much, Mary. Hi, everyone as a reintroduction, my name is Brian. I’m a product manager recently leading the launch of our Live Captioning for Zoom, both meetings and webinars, like you’re seeing on the screen. If you joined a little bit later after Sarah’s beginning housekeeping, you can enable live captions on your screen right now in your Zoom window, by going down to the bottom of the zoom window, clicking the, “Closed Caption” option, and then clicking show subtitle, and you can also hide and remove them at any time. If the subtitles aren’t quite large enough, or you need to adjust the size to either see the screen, or to see the text a little bit better, in that same closed caption button, you’ll also see an option for subtitle settings, I believe it’s called. And from there, it’ll take you to the Zoom window settings, where you should see a slider to increase and decrease your text size.

Brian: (10:35)
So I think it’s probably worth starting a little bit of why Rev decided to build live captions for Zoom specifically. I think it’s obvious to say that, as COVID-19 spread, universities and colleges and businesses like Rev really were challenged with figuring out how to move into a fully remote world, which meant issues with scaling, with making their content accessible, with just pure communication, and as Rev as a business that really prides itself on helping you unlock the most power from your audio and video, we felt best positioned to be able to help meet goals around accessibility, engagement, and ultimately a product that is really easily scalable in organizations of all sizes. So whether you’re looking to test something with a few users or select excited beta users that want to roll this out into their classrooms, or to the research facilities, or you’re looking to scale to something entire department or the entire university, we’ve built this product in mind for easy use with your administration and technical teams.

Brian: (11:42)
So a little bit about how Rev Live Captions helps. As you’re seeing on the screen, Rev Live Captions is doing exactly like you might expect it to do, which is converting everything spoken live into text on the Zoom meeting itself. When we were deciding how to go about providing accessibility to Zoom specifically, we really prioritize wanting captions in the-

Brian: (12:03)
… Zoom specifically, we really prioritize wanting captions in the meeting on the screen itself versus something external to Zoom where it’s either harder to use or there’s just a higher barrier to finding and making sure it’s engaging, compared to having the text directly into Zoom and inside of the meeting where you’re already engaged. Let’s see, I might’ve cut out a little bit. Mary or Sarah, can you confirm if you could still hear me? I think your videos are a little delayed.

Sara Ciskie: (12:34)
I can still hear you.

Brian: (12:34)
Okay, cool. Thank you. Appreciate for bearing with us. Residential wi-fi is also going under quite a stress tests these days, so I’m glad we could test that all live together.

Sara Ciskie: (13:19)
Hey, Brian, your sound cut out.

Brian: (13:21)
Okay, Sarah. I’m back now. Thank you so much again for bearing with us. All right, feeling good? Cool. Thank you. So, Rev Live Captions was built with security and making sure that all of your content is safe and secure in mind. In our public launch, all of the content is safe, securely transferred between Zoom and Rev, and none of the content, either audio, video or text is stored on our website at all. And it was a conscious decision by Rev, when we were deciding how to provide accessible captions in Zoom, to ensure that we had took the strictest version of this security in mind. And what we’re really excited about, the opportunity to do now, is to think about how to integrate those video, audio, and text content back into your Rev ecosystem so that you can make it usable either through other Rev services that we provide, or as a platform to be able to provide your text and video out towhere your end users will ultimately see the content. So, wanted to make a particular call out to those security practices that we believe is utmost important, particularly for all of you as administrators and video producers, but of course your audience members, knowing that they’re there sensitive meeting data is kept safe.

Brian: (14:55)
A brief introduction into how it works. This is going to be a very high level view, that happy to follow up a little bit more. I think an exciting call out is that we’re not yet live publicly, so what you’re seeing is a little sneak preview into what you’ll be seeing in the coming week or so, I’m very hopeful, for our public launch. But the biggest emphasis on setup and how it works is that it is a one time installation and admin process, that you can then scale out to your entire organization. Again, big or small. We are running our live captions for Zoom service as a third party application on Zoom’s marketplace. You may already be familiar with this with other integrations like Google Calendar, or maybe you’re already part of the Rev Live Captions beta. If you are, thank you so much for helping us test and give us valuable feedback.

Brian: (15:45)
And the biggest emphasis here is that for your end users, they will not have to go through any installation or setup process, that all happens centrally. That gives you as administrators and the folks in control here one, the ease of use of onetime install. Two, the ability to nominate and roll out the service in a way, in a manner that you see fit. And three, be able to swap in and out users on the fly and be able to adapt Rev Live Captions to your ongoing organizational needs. So, US administrators, after you install the app, have the power to decide who should and shouldn’t have access to Rev Live Captions. And then, from there, all of those users will have Rev Live Captions automatically join all of their hosted meetings automatically. And for all participants in those meetings, just like you did at the beginning of this webinar, they have the option to show and hide subtitles from there.

Brian: (16:44)
I think it was a really big design decision when we’re thinking about how to roll out live captions, that it was as simple to install and use, and completely removing or even eliminating the training that you’ll need to do with your end users. So, we know that technology is only as useful as people actually adopt it and know how to engage with it ongoing. And the most we can do to minimize the amount of steps they have to go through, the better. I do want to call out as well here, that our primary product that we’re launching is live captions specifically for Zoom meetings. However, what I will touch on in a little bit later is what you’re seeing on the screen for Zoom webinars, an additional addon that we’ll offer as an feature for Rev Pro customers that are willing to partner with us for a little bit longer and are looking for something a little bit more organizational wide so that they can have live captions for both meetings and webinars.

Sara Ciskie: (17:45)
Hey, Brian. So, thanks so much for all this info first of all. We did have a quick question come in from Clayton around the privacy that you mentioned. So, for the Rev Live Zoom Captions, is this addon HIPAA compliant, and are we signing BAs with customers?

Brian: (18:04)
Good question. And actually, Sarah, I might pump the BA question back to you, but I wanted to touch on the HIPAA. Unfortunately, Rev is not HIPAA compliant today, but we are pursuing that and I think we would start with our automated services. So, it’s worth calling out that right what you’re seeing on the screen is a completely automated service with no humans in the loop. And we’re looking to scale out our HIPAA compliance, as you could probably expect, starting with those software only services. And also, Clayton, call out to the UCF. I’m here in San Francisco. So, yeah. No, thanks for all you do. Cool. Sarah, did you have anything to add on the BA piece there?

Sara Ciskie: (18:48)
I think that refers to business agreements and our sales team does work with universities, with institutions to find an agreement that meets your needs. So, best thing to do there would be to reach out to our sales team.

Brian: (19:02)
Great. Thanks so much. Great. So, yeah, as I mentioned, after the one time installation at the admin level, all users will have Rev Live Captions automatically join their meetings and then participants can decide to show and hide them at their choosing. And then, post-meeting, saving captions is possible and encouraged for meetings that you want to be able to share more broadly. And that feature actually exists on Zoom’s side through their safe captions feature, where once enabled for a given user or an organization, Zoom will automatically save those captions as part of the meeting save feature. So, if you save the meeting and you decided to see if the captions, for example, in the Zoom cloud, you’ll also be able to see the automated captions playback. What I would encourage you to think about as well is if those automated captions are meeting those needs. I think for the majority of the cases you’ll find, yes, it’s great. It’s absolutely better than nothing. But as Mary mentioned, there could be benefits, especially for external facing content of Rev’s human captioning services that can go through our human marketplace and get to that 99% ADA compliant level.

Sara Ciskie: (20:15)
We did have a couple more questions come in around captions specifically. So, first of all, with the Zoom Live Captions, will those captions themselves be recorded either as a text file or as a captions file?

Brian: (20:29)
Yes, exactly. Yeah, so they can be recorded. And again, that feature exists on Zoom’s side. And they can be saved as both a text file or a VTT timed text file, that would be either saved locally or in the cloud as part of your Zoom cloud recordings.

Sara Ciskie: (20:46)
Got it. And so, that VTT file, you could then upload to a YouTube video or Vimeo or any other platform that would ingest that, correct?

Brian: (20:53)
Exactly, yeah. And an exciting point that Rev is jumping into, moving into the world of live video, is thinking about how we can help assist with that workflow. I’m sure you all have very complex workflows related to your live video conferencing software, but then all of the pieces, of your learning management systems or just video management systems more generally, to be able to get the timed text there. What Rev is now starting to explore more into is how we can assist with that transfer from Zoom into those platforms. As Mary mentioned, we have already built quite a few of those video integration platforms, so that it’s very easy to transfer video and texts between Rev and those platforms. And we see Zoom as, obviously, another player in that market that we want to be able to assist with.

Sara Ciskie: (21:40)
Awesome. And then, a really good question here. So, obviously, since machine generated, they won’t be perfect, right? Do end users have the ability to edit these captions in the Rev interface the same as they would for human services?

Brian: (21:55)
Good question. So, unfortunately you can’t. There’s not an option to edit those in the Rev interface today. That said, with the files downloaded through Zoom, either as a text file or VTT, you can open the text editor there. That said, that’s exactly the building block that we’re looking to continue building within, within Rev and Zoom. So, as I mentioned, right now, primarily for security reasons, we have only allowed saving to happen on the Zoom side, but very soon we’re looking to provide additional features so that you can choose to push those videos and texts to your rev.com interface, so that one, you can edit it alongside any other video content that you have, but then two, be able to use Rev as your hub for closed captioning and as an organizational method as well

Sara Ciskie: (22:42)
Completely makes sense. So, in order to leverage this tool, for example, would you also have to have a professional Rev account as well?

Brian: (22:49)
No. So, I’ll touch on in a few slides from now the options for integrating with Zoom, but there’s no need to have a Rev Pro agreement to use Rev Live Captions. Starting on launch, this will be accessible to all users with lower commitments. That said, I do think there are quite a few benefits to pooling that usage across your entire university or department in a Rev Pro package.

Sara Ciskie: (23:18)
Absolutely. Then, last question and then we’ll move on from this slide. As far as technical jargon, a lot of the users who’d be interested in this are educators, right? So, there might be scientific course content, math related course content. How DO the captions do organically with those terms, and are we able to submit glossary terms to help train it as such?

Brian: (23:42)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I think the first piece on the organic is that Rev has designed our in house automated speech recognition to constantly be evolving. We have weekly updates and it’s something that we’re consistently tailoring to our customers’ needs. Right now, there’s not an option to introduce a custom dictionary into Rev Live Captions. That said-

Brian: (24:03)
… introduce a custom dictionary into real life captions that said we’re a few weeks or months away from being able to offer to that too. We’ll likely start with Rev Pro customers first as a way to test and be able to make their captions even more accurate and tailored to their needs, and then make that accessible to all users.

Sara Ciskie: (24:19)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Brian. And thanks to everyone for the questions, all great content there.

Brian: (24:24)
Awesome. So a few more slides before I fully wrap up and we get just fully into the Q and A. This slide is obvious to say, the live captions show up directly in your Zoom window, and you’ll know that by seeing the live on custom live streaming service on the top left. In the meetings view of Zoom meetings it will say, live on Rev Live captions, that will be much more specific so that all meeting participants know what’s being streamed out of their Zoom meeting. I won’t go ahead and play this YouTube video right now, but it will be linked in the slides we’ll send out after this webinar.

Brian: (25:06)
A brief overview of our existing beta experience of how to add Rev Live captions to Zoom. The only additional piece that you’ll see in a few weeks time when we have our more public launch of our full service, is the administrative view of how to first integrate and then assign users to your account. I did want to just take a moment to pause and discuss also some possibly confusing, I don’t think Rev has done a great job of making this a lot less confusing out there in the world of differences between rev.com and Rev AI. So on the left hand side, rev.com is what Mary has done a great introduction to, for all of our speech and tech services, that are what we would call internally as kind of end user facing. These are products that you can build or products that you can use with no technical knowledge needed, and then be able to integrate seamlessly into your workflows.

Brian: (26:08)
Rev AI refers to the teams of technologies that focus purely on our automated speech recognition services. And Rev AI automated speech recognition powers Rev Live captions that you’re seeing on screen, it powers our automated transcription on rev.com, and it also powers our other service, Temi, which you may be familiar with as well. Internally, Rev AI also refers to about a dozen speech scientists and engineers, both working independently and collaboratively with other rev.com teams to improve our core automated speech recognition technology and then also applying the technology to solve a variety of speech and techs needs. So Rev Live captions built on top of Rev AI’s live streaming API that has been available to developers for a few years now, and to date that service has only offered it’s platform developers that can integrate with the API. And what I’m really excited to share with you and what you’re seeing on screen, is our application of that into an existing applications so that end users can use without any advanced development needs.

Brian: (27:16)
A little bit about our speech recognition engine, what I’m really, really proud to say is that in two short years, Rev AI’s speech recognition has quickly outperformed incumbents in the space that you’ll recognize, names like Google and Microsoft. Rev AI consistently performs better when measured against word error rate, that’s the WER here, that we’re first the percentages of wrong text outputs for a given file. So we run constant tests against our competitors to ensure that we’re staying ahead of the curve, and a large part of that, like Mary said, is in large part due to our human transcription services. Unlike Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, who for the most part structure their businesses around short form content and commands, Rev is clearly optimizing against longer form content in speech in a real world setting where you have cross talkers, you have not perfect audio. It’s a very different problem to solve than speaking into your phone.

Brian: (28:13)
So really, really excited, and I think the thing that makes me most excited about the future of our speech recognition, again, it that dedicated team of speech scientists and engineers who are day in and day out looking to improve our speech recognition. So, similar to the question that Sarah teed up a little bit earlier, we’re constantly trying to evolve so that we can adapt to new vocabulary, things like COVID-19 and coronavirus, I really hope they show up in the captions. Oh, it’s going to take a second. In any case, I’ll move on. Nice, I think I got it. And of course, to a variety of different speakers and different speech situations.

Brian: (29:05)
So, I think moving on and this might be just in time to the questions about cost and the chat, on launch we’ll have two different pricing models available to all customers. On the left-hand side describes our, go to rev.com and sign up any time with any number of users that we billed at $20 a user per month. Important to note here, the user unit is a Zoom host. So you can go and add 5, 10 Zoom hosts to Rev Live Captions, and from then on all of their meetings will be automatically live captions and all meeting participants, whether they’re subscribers or not, will have access to the live captions in the meeting. So just like you started this webinar at the beginning with enabling all participants for meetings hosted by somebody with access to Rev Live Captions, will have that same option. On the right hand side. I would really encourage you to think if you have a larger organizational need, to reach out to our sales team. First and foremost, you’ll you’ll have access to volume discounts, you’ll also have access to live captions [inaudible 00:30:13] webinars, what you’re seeing on the screen right now, as well as some more flexible billing and a lot of the other benefits that come with our Rev Pro packages. Important to note here that, we don’t want to treat Rev Live Captions as a standalone service, you as an organization have a lot of speech and texts needs both for transcription and captioning. And so, if you have any kind of larger need as an organization, I really would encourage you to reach out to our sales team and then add on Rev Live Captions as an additional bullet point to chat about. Super, super excited to see how you all find use of this, and then obviously as a product manager, getting all of your customer feedback and helping us to improve the service.

Brian: (30:52)
Great. So the very last slide I will just say is, to date, we’ve been really blessed to be trusted by a lot of universities and colleges out there. I personally am an alum of Duke University, so it warms my heart to see their name on this slide. We have quite a few, UT, University of Texas folks in house at Rev as well. But we’re really excited if we are already partnering with you to look forward to those opportunities, so please do reach out and let us know how we can help. Great. Thank you so much. I’m going to turn it back to Sarah for Q and A.

Sara Ciskie: (31:26)
Awesome. And thanks to everyone who’s already submitted some questions in, we’ve answered several of them sort of during the presentation itself. One question that came in, so obviously we see the captions here live, for a human to actually type it out would take a little more time, “How long would it take approximately to get a closed caption file back if someone sends in a video into Rev?”

Brian: (31:52)
Good question. So, and just to clarify, I’m taking this question to be the human captioning service. That generally, [crosstalk 00:07:59], yeah, that really depends on the length of the video, but for videos in the 30 minute length period, we generally expect turnaround times of around 12 hours. And with both our captioning and transcription services, we have options to rush and push this at the top of our queue, that can make sure that you meet your deadline to your external customers. So that’s 30 minute, 12 hour estimated turnaround time is a good benchmark to work with, but what I would encourage you as well, when you reach out to our sales team and talk to anybody at Rev, is to place a few test orders and see how those files go.

Sara Ciskie: (32:36)
Awesome. And then we had a question come in around HIPAA compliance, this is a point that we brought up earlier, “So what exactly is required of HIPAA compliance and what all does that entail?”

Mary Kenny: (32:48)
Happy to speak to that. So HIPAA is the Health Insurance, Portability and Accountability Act, and what it does is it really sets the standard for sensitive patient data protection. So, companies that deal with Protected Health Information or PHI, must have physical network and process security measures in place and make sure that they follow them to ensure HIPAA compliance. So what that could look like for Rev specifically, some examples of PHI could be file names, file metadata, the contents of the audio, video, and the corresponding transcribed or even captioned content. So, while we’ve made, Rev’s made really significant investments in security with encryption, both at rest and in transit and industry best practices, HIPAA compliant companies specifically are required to have a formal organization-wide strategy in place to adequately secure protected health information.

Sara Ciskie: (33:51)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mary, for giving that explanation on HIPAA. Another question that came in from Amy is, “We’ve been happy with Rev for our closed captioning on recorded webinars, if we add the live captioning Rev AI to our account, would the captions be available in the recording?”

Brian: (34:09)
Yeah. And I think the caveat here is how you’re recording the webinars themselves. So for… Oh, can you hear me? Okay, maybe I’ll stop my sharing, maybe that’s hitting my home wifi a little too much. Okay, I think I’m back. So, with recorded webinars to ensure that Rev Live Captions join your video wherever it’s going, it’s important to think about where the kind of end placement of that video is. If you’re using the Zoom Cloud recording, those live captions will automatically be part of the Cloud recording. But if you’re pushing it to something like Panopto or YouTube, you will have to bring the time text file that you can save through Zoom to Panopto or YouTube. And where we’re working right now with Rev to help is build those bridges so that it’s a much more automated service. And so, in short with Cloud recordings, it will automatically be joined, but if you’re moving the video recording to another service, you’ll also want to make sure that you move the text file.

Sara Ciskie: (35:27)
Awesome. Thanks. And we’ve also had a couple of questions come in about live captions for other platforms. So we see the live captions here available on Zoom, we had a question from Kat come in about Rev integrating with Webex. And then Dan asked a question about integrating with other platforms like Ustream, are there any other platforms where we would offer this service as well?

Brian: (35:48)
Great questions. So, unfortunately, not today, but it’s clearly very much on our radars. I think we moved to Zoom primarily because we saw the huge need particularly within higher education, but then us as business users, we use Zoom every day and want to make our content-

Brian: (36:03)
Us, as business users, we use Zoom every day and want to make our content as accessible as possible. So we are starting with Zoom, but it almost certainly will not be our last place. We want to make sure our live captions are available to as many platforms as possible, and then you, as the end user, have access to Rev live captions across all the platforms you use today. But, in short, not today, but we’re looking to build it very quickly.

Sara Ciskie: (36:26)
Awesome. So one housekeeping question. Will you be sharing this recording? Absolutely. Everyone will receive the recording in the next couple of days, and then when will live captions for Zoom webinars be available? So we have it here for this webinar. Is it available for other customers that are using Rev as well?

Brian: (36:42)
Yeah, great question. So live captions will be available to webinars in the coming weeks for our Rev Pro customers. We’re starting our access at what do we call the Enterprise Tier for folks that have a larger wide agreement with Rev and a large part of that is helping our customers scale that out to their webinars very seamlessly. Unfortunately, with webinars, we don’t have quite as easy of the access of automatically joining the webinars. There are one or two more steps per webinar to go and configure, but we’d hope that once you’re excited about live captioning for Zoom meetings that we could also make that pitch and partner more closely with Zoom to be able to provide captioning in the webinars a lot easier.

Sara Ciskie: (37:36)
Awesome. And then just, I think I understand this question, does Rev have training for human captioning for this Rev and Zoom initiative? So, as a user setting this up, what support will I have as I’m integrating these two and maybe sharing this with my team?

Brian: (37:57)
We absolutely will have training off the back, both for customers that come directly to our Rev website and have access to all of our more detailed help center articles to walk through all the steps to integrate and then use it ongoing and troubleshoot. For our Rev Pro customers, as you could probably expect, you’ll have priority support and also a little bit more of a personalized tailored experience with onboarding to be able to make sure that it’s really meeting your needs.

Sara Ciskie: (38:24)
Awesome. And then what is the expected delay in live captions?

Brian: (38:31)
Great question. So what you’re seeing on the screen is a delay of something between a three to five seconds and a lot of it has to do with speaker speed. Unfortunately, I know I’m quite a fast speaker by nature. It’s actually a struggle for me to slow down. What we are actively working on is getting those captions even faster on screen. And again, part of the excitement with having our in-house speech recognition is being able to offer rapid improvements to meet our specific needs, including Rev live captions for Zoom.

Sara Ciskie: (39:06)
Awesome. And I know earlier you spoke towards the word error rate between several different platforms that provide automated closed captions. I imagine a lot of attendees here are wondering what solution might be correct for them and their use case. How accurate are Rev’s human transcription and closed captioning options versus Rev AI?

Brian: (39:28)
Great question. So with Rev’s human closed captioning and transcription, you can fully expect a 99% accuracy nearing 100 in certain situations. Of course, accuracy, worth calling out, will vary based on difficulty of the audio in terms of the quality and how well we can hear it, the availability of cross speakers. But the largest benefit of having a human caption our transcription is that you have another human on the other side who can understand words out of context, who can parse out what sounds like important audio or not, unlike a machine. With machines, we always say that you should expect 80% plus accuracy, and that obviously gets a lot closer to the human level accuracy when there’s only one speaker, when there’s a clear microphone like I’m speaking into right now, and when the subject of the audio is not too technical or uses more common terms.

Sara Ciskie: (40:30)
Awesome. And so, first of all, thank you, Mary, thank you, Brian for putting all this content together. This has been amazingly helpful. So last quick question for both of you, what’s the one piece of advice that you’d leave this audience with?

Brian: (40:49)
Good question. I’ll give it a start. I would encourage everyone, and this has been a great learning process for me moving into the world of live captioning as well, to think about accessibility on a spectrum. I think it’s very safe to say and I think we all know intuitively that having accessible features like closed captioning is way better than nothing at any scale, but really, the context matters and the audience matters. I recall part of our investigation and research going into Rev live captions was speaking with the heads of the National Association for the Deaf, which you may be very familiar with in the university world as someone that has always been championing accessibility, particularly for the deaf and hard of hearing community, and a point that really stuck out for me was thinking about the place of automated captions and how that really drastically changes depending on the audience.

Brian: (41:41)
For higher education and for business purposes like us, it’s really, really great. It’s an affordable solution, there’s realistic caps on how we can rally human captioning around certain content, and then, of course, the cost aspect and the administration of it that make it unachievable or a too lofty goal to have human captioning for all events. But for use cases like children in kindergarten, I think the NAD mentioned for folks below high school education they do not recommend automated captioning because context matters, every word matters, it’s folks that are still learning their language development skills. And I think that that added piece has been a really helpful guide for how I think about advocating for accessibility and how I think about structuring and building these products and where they matter.

Brian: (42:32)
So I’m really excited to be at Rev where we’re trying to tackle all of those problems. It’s obviously not easy from either the administration side, as you all are very aware of, or even making sure it can meet all of the specific needs of each audience member. But it truly is a fight worth having so I’m really excited to be continuing to push that out [inaudible 00:42:52].

Mary Kenny: (42:54)
That’s great. Brian. For me, I would say the piece of advice that I would give to all of you would be to really, from an efficiency and automation perspective, thinking about some of the maybe more tedious tasks or steps in your workflow, whether it is specifically related to how you order transcripts or get captions, and split up all of those steps and see if there are ways to automate that. Obviously, that saves you a lot of time. T hat’s time that you can invest back in your team, whether it’s your faculty or your students. And it’s something that I personally spend a lot of time thinking about. And, fortunately, Rev has a lot of ways to help our customers automate their order placement and order delivery workflows so that you spend as little time as possible worrying about getting your transcripts or captions back from us.

Sara Ciskie: (43:49)
Amazing. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Brian. Thank you to all of our attendees for coming. Join us again tomorrow and Friday. Tomorrow, we’ll be having a fireside chat with NYU and West Virginia University. Super excited for it. In the meantime, everyone have a wonderful day.