Automatic Sync Technologies and Tegrity Partner to Automate Fully Captioned Lecture Capture, Providing Accessible, Searchable Digital Content for Students in Higher Education

HAYWARD, Calif., July 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) today announced a partnership with Tegrity, the leading campus-wide lecture capture service and a division of McGraw Hill Higher Education. AST's CaptionSync™ technology now supports Tegrity Campus, providing a fully automated service for instructors that delivers time-coded, synchronized captions for lectures or supplementary course content recorded with Tegrity.  

Compatible with Tegrity's powerful Search Anything(TM) technology, the captions are fully searchable by students across a single course, or all enrolled courses. As students review the captions, Tegrity enables them to create their own bookmarks, notes and annotations that are associated with the captioned content - making learning incredibly efficient.

The combined CaptionSync and Tegrity solutions automate the process of captioning class recordings, helping institutions comply with accessibility legislation for deaf and hard-of-hearing students while also empowering video search for all students.

"The majority of our customers deploy Tegrity campus-wide, so automation becomes critical," said Isaac Segal, president of Tegrity. "The ability to automate the captioning process with CaptionSync from AST technology enables our customers to handle captioning requirements at scale both effectively and affordably," he added.  

"AST has been our choice for captioning our educational content to make it available to the widest audience," said Kathy Brooks, Instructional Designer, eLearning at Centralia College. "AST delivers excellent results, quick turn-around time and personalized customer service, and I am excited about Tegrity's integration with AST's automated captioning process. I am confident in AST's efforts to combine solutions and provide an easy process for integrating captioning into our eLearning services."

The requests for captions can be made by students or faculty, and are reviewed by a central source for institution approval. Once approved, the captions are automatically created by CaptionSync and placed into the Tegrity recording.

"We have designed CaptionSync to ensure that captioning is quick and cost-effective," says Kevin Erler, president of Automatic Sync Technologies. "Our integration with Tegrity makes it even easier to provide digital content that is universally accessible and searchable with high-quality captioning."

About Tegrity

Tegrity, a division of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, provides the only cloud-based Lecture Capture solution proven to improve student achievement, satisfaction, retention and recruitment across an institution. It makes class time available all the time by automatically recording, storing and indexing every class, as well as supplemental content, without the need to install any special hardware or software in classrooms. The company's patent-pending Search Anything™ and Smart Bookmarks™ features then let students instantly review key class moments online using a PC, Mac, iPod, iPad or other mobile device. For more information, visit http://www.tegrity.com.

About CaptionSync™

CaptionSync is an innovative, proprietary software service powered by Automatic Sync Technologies, providing high-quality automated captioning and can simultaneously generate caption output for multiple types of media from a single electronic submission. Web-media formats include Flash, QuickTime and Windows Media, for many platforms: Mediasite, Brightcove, Echo360, Panopto and YouTube, and for DVD authoring and broadcast. CaptionSync provides the Gold Standard in accuracy because it does not rely on speech recognition software with its inherent errors - AST stands apart from other providers for this reason.  

About Automatic Sync Technologies

Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) is an industry-leading provider of web-based captioning services for thousands of customers worldwide, enabling accurate video and rich media search and retrieval to public and private sector enterprise. Formed in 1998, AST pioneered automated captioning technology to deliver the most cost-efficient, high-quality, automatic captioning service available today. AST helps government agencies and educational institutions comply with regulations to make advanced communication services accessible to hard-of-hearing and deaf audiences. Contact AST by email: [email protected], online at http://www.automaticsync.com, or call +1 (877) 278-7962

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Press Contacts

Automatic Sync Technologies
Kaye McKinzie
Quatrain PR
(415) 927-7365
[email protected]  

Tegrity
Karen Marotta
Kwittken & Company
(646) 277-7111
[email protected]

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SOURCE Automatic Sync Technologies