You’ve probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo’s filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow’s New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one – to make video interesting.
Like Tubechop, Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service’s transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, “At some point, longer videos become useless. It’s the metadata and the fact that we’re allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool.”
The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a Mechanical Turk package. For $20 dollars per hour of video, you can have speeches, events and podcasts transcribed. The company plans on creating a premium service and launching on additional video platforms in the months ahead. For now, Speakertext offers the following benefits:
Attribution & Monetization: Says Mireles, “Video piracy often happens because users can’t get the clips they want from the original publisher. We’re building a monetizable search strategy for video publishers.” Because Speakertext just sets the original video to a new start point, there is no need for a new file to be uploaded by a secondary publisher. In this way, the secondary publisher highlights the content they want and the original publisher maintains credit, links from search and potential revenue channels.
Accuracy: Stop for a moment and think about the quagmire of misinformation swimming across the web right now. From religious figures to political candidates to CEOs, there is no shortage of misquotes in the media today. If you want to be a transparent company, government or influential entity, video transcription is a great way to dispel myth from fact. The company will also crowdsource transcription accuracy in a method similar to that of the Worldwide Lexicon Project.
Education and Research: Video has been a boon for visual learners. Now, rather than simply searching titles and descriptions, transcription will allow users to find valuable educational resources. The company is already speaking to open courseware proponents to increase access to quality materials.
Mireles points out that Google is currently in the process of automating captions for YouTube. Says the startup founder, “We have no doubt whether searchable video like this will be the standard in 5 years. We just want it to be us that does it.”
Speakertext will launch to the public at 5pm PST tomorrow evening at speakertext.com.
Thanks to David Cohn for the tip!
