About
Kaltura’s Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology provides machine-generated captions for both live and on-demand content through the Reach framework.
This article outlines Kaltura’s native ASR-based capabilities, including live ASR, language auto-detect for VOD, and dictionary support - available to customers using Reach.
- To learn about general Reach services, see Introduction to Kaltura's captioning and enrichment services ('Reach')
- For ordering instructions, see Order captions and Order live captions and live translations.
Contact your Kaltura representative for enablement or configuration support.
Live ASR
Kaltura Live ASR provides automatic, real-time captions for live webcasts and events created through Kaltura. It’s fully integrated with Reach, making it easy to request and manage live captions directly within the event workflow.
Highlights
- Integrated within the Reach live caption ordering flow
- Supports multiple spoken languages (availability may vary by account - contact your Kaltura representative for details)
- Can be rescheduled before event start
- Dictionary support for custom vocabulary
VOD ASR
For on-demand media, Kaltura VOD ASR can automatically detect the primary spoken language and generate captions in that language - no manual selection needed.
Highlights
- Simplifies captioning for multilingual video libraries
- Appears in the Captions & enrichment 'Languages' menu as Auto-Detect
- Ideal for single-language, non-English, audio tracks
- Detects one main language per video
- Mixed-language audio is not supported
Supported languages
The following languages are supported for VOD ASR with language auto-detect:
Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cantonese (CH/HK), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Mandarin (CN), Mandarin (TW), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese*, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
*The system understands Brazilian Portuguese, but it isn’t tagged separately. Anything in Brazilian or European Portuguese will just show up as 'Portuguese'.
Dictionary support
Kaltura’s ASR services include optional dictionary support to improve recognition accuracy for brand names, acronyms, and domain-specific terms.
Highlights
- Available for both Live and VOD ASR
- Custom vocabulary improves word recognition accuracy
- Included with the captioning service, no extra setup needed
Dictionaries can’t override standard spellings in supported languages.
