About
Genie is Kaltura’s AI-powered knowledge assistant, designed to help users quickly find trusted answers based only on your organization’s verified content.
It works within your Video Portal, Event site, or LMS integration and pulls only from published, captioned entries organized in dedicated categories.
This guide gives admins an overview of how Genie works behind the scenes and what’s required to keep it running smoothly.
How Genie uses your organization's content
Genie pulls from published, captioned video and document entries - nothing else. It never indexes private or unlisted content and always respects user permissions. That means users only see content they’re allowed to access.
For more on user entitlements, visit our article Video Portal and LMS Video roles and permissions.
Kaltura does not use your data to train AI models. To learn more, see Kaltura’s Artificial Intelligence Principles.
Content requirements
- Each relevant entry includes at least one English caption file (multiple languages are supported, but English is required).
- If you use machine-generated captions, consider adding a dictionary to improve accuracy for domain-specific terms and names.
- Genie will always use the caption file with the highest accuracy available.
- Genie also pulls from DOCX, PPTX, and PDF entries that meet these content requirements.
OCR support
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) extracts visible text from video content, such as slides or whiteboards. This can improve searchability and enrich flashcard results.
To use OCR:
- Your Kaltura account must have REACH enabled.
- OCR must be enabled in the Genie configuration for specific Genie IDs.
- Videos must have OCR metadata, which is generated by ordering a REACH task.
Once processed, OCR data is automatically added to Genie’s searchable content. Flashcards that use OCR show image thumbnails with a Go to source link.
For ordering instructions, see our articles Order captions, Order captions via KMC, and Order OCR.
Document support
Genie also supports document entries, specifically DOCX, PPTX, and PDF, making it less dependent on video content and dramatically expanding its coverage. Content from these documents will appear in Genie results as text summaries and will also be listed in the Sources section, just like videos.
For more information, check out Document entries.
Channel-based Genie
You can enable Genie at the channel level for more contextual answers. Choose to enable it for all channels or just specific ones. When active, a banner appears on the channel page and users click Genie to open the 'Ask Anything' page.
Add Genie to navigation bar
Add a link to Genie to your navigation bar so users can find it easily. Check out our article Navigation module for instructions.
User access & permissions
Genie strictly follows your existing user access controls - it only shows entries the user has permission to see. You can enable Genie for everyone in a specific user role, limit it to a specific user group, or allow access for unauthenticated visitors on public video portals.
Analytics
Admins can request a Genie usage report through their Kaltura representative. This report includes:
- All questions asked by users
- The answers they received
- Any feedback provided (thumbs up/down and explanations)
