• Increase the chances your content will be found. Full, or even partial, text is more searchable than tags and titles alone. “I’ve found that on several of our clients’ blogs, the transcript often outperforms its corresponding podcast,” says Janelle Kozyra, the Director of Editorial and Senior Managing Editor for Gregory FCA.
• Make your content more accessible. People who can’t hear the video, or those who don’t want to search through it, will find transcripts useful. Ted Cocheu, the founder and CEO of Altus (an enterprise provider of video search and management tools) said recently, “New technology is enabling enterprises to easily combine PowerPoint presentations with audio/video into a dynamic format that is searchable down to the point of interest or keyword. . . . As a result, users can have instant access to the information they need.”
• Make repurposing your content easier. Once you have a transcript, it’s a short step to a tweet, a blog post or a slide deck.

Creating these transcripts is becoming easier, and there are alternatives.

• Professional transcriptionists. These professionals provide high quality and full control of the process. But this may be overkill for some audio and video.
• Crowdsourcing. Ryan Lawler has covered the development of SpeakerText, a firm that supports the crowdsourcing of transcripts. The Kahn Academy crowdsources transcription and translation through Universal Subtitles.
• Automatic captioning. YouTube uses Google’s voice-to-text technology to create autocaptions.

This is a call to both content creators and users to support transcription. Content creators: Please use a service that adds transcripts to your audio and video content. Users: Help where you can by contributing to the crowdsourcing efforts.

How have you benefited through audio or video transcription in your web work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iwan Gabovitch

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The US-based service enables users to capture the audio content of any phone call or conference calls in their entirety for later transcription to text by the service. Users can also markup parts of the call for particular emphasis during the transcription process. Apparently marking up such segments of a call is as simple as hitting a touchtone keypad to issue stop and start commands, though I’m sure a visual aid to this would be a welcome future addition.

Indeed, the service derives its name from ‘cogent ideas’, the parts of conversations that seem to be the most important.

Like reQall, the service is using a combination of speech-to-text technology and human assistance to produce accurate transcripts. However what’s probably more useful than the transcript itself are the implications of a digitized record of audio conversations. All of a sudden, a previously transitory and inert medium becomes searchable, sharable and intrinsically more valuable. Of course there are privacy implications in recording calls, but no more complex than existing issues in retaining phone calls.

At $30/month for 1000 minutes it’s a pricey service, but perhaps the company has inadvertently developed a ‘Gmail for voice’. Regardless, additional price tiers may be neccessary to encourage casual use and wider adoption.

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