TechSmith is the global leader in screen recording and screen capture software and solutions. The company’s goal is to make content creating for trainings, tutorials, lessons, and everyday communication an easier and more effective process. TechSmith’s flagship products, Snagit and Camtasia, have more than 34 million users worldwide.

The ability to create content that does not require translation is a challenge that many TechSmith customers face as they work to generate material for speakers of varying languages. Screen captured images or videos that contain text in another language or that is irrelevant to the goal of the video is confusing and distracting to the audience. There is a need for a system that helps customers create more language agnostic content for their audience to consume.

Our ViSUI: Video Simplified User Interface web application enables customers to effortlessly remove distracting text from a video by replacing it with simple shapes, such as rectangles. This makes videos simple and understandable to all audiences.

When the user uploads a video, they can press a button that prompts our software to scan the entire video for text. Once the scanning is complete, the user is presented with suggestions for simplifying the text on each frame of the video. The user can then edit the Simplified User Interface rectangles as desired.

Users also have the option to remove the audio track from the video they upload. Once editing is complete, users can save their project to a video library and export it to another application for sharing.

Our web application is made using JavaScript and React. The text detection is accomplished with Microsoft’s Optical Character Recognition API and the frame-by-frame video manipulation is handled with the FFmpeg framework. Our web application, video storage, and database are hosted on Microsoft Azure.