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 video integration, and uses only published, captioned entries organized in dedicated categories. Proper planning ensures Genie runs smoothly, respects user permissions, and stays fully aligned with your content controls.
This guide gives admins an overview of how Genie uses your content, what’s required to keep it working well, and how to manage key features like channels, OCR, permissions, and navigation.
How Genie uses your content
Genie only pulls from your organization’s own verified videos and documents, and does not use any external sources. It always respects user entitlements so people only see results they’re allowed to access, for example, two users with different permissions might get different answers to the same question. Unlisted or private entries are never included.
Kaltura does not use customer data to train its AI models. To learn more, see Kaltura’s Artificial Intelligence Principles. For more on user entitlements, visit our article Video Portal and LMS Video roles and permissions.
Content requirements
Genie relies on captions as its main source of information for video and audio entries. Make sure each relevant entry has an English caption file. It’s fine to include multiple caption files, but at least one must be in English.
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.
OCR support
When enabled, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) pulls visible text from slides, whiteboards, or other on-screen content to help enrich flashcard results.
When to use it:
OCR is especially useful for videos with presentation slides, classroom whiteboards, or any other visible on-screen text. 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, the OCR data is automatically added to Genie’s database.
What it looks like:
Information from OCR text is integrated in the flashcard summary. If specific OCR results are relevant, a thumbnail preview is shown, with a link to the source entry. These entries also appear in the Sources list, alongside videos and documents.
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 in video portal.
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.
For instructions, see the Genie module.
Add Genie to the navigation
Add a link to Genie in your video portal navigation 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.
For instructions on setting up roles and groups, see the Genie module.
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)
