Podcast transcription service with Trint Player for searchable audio
Journalist-entrepreneur Jeff Kofman is the founder of Trint, and explains how Trint works for podcasters..
Q: How will Trint work with podcasts?
JK: We've built the Trint Player. It provides embeddable, searchable audio aligned text video and video. Users can embed the Trint Player on websites, making audio-video content that will be searchable on Google. People will be able to find that content and instantly send it out on Twitter, Facebook, wherever. There will even be a captioning facility too.
Q: With the work that's been done so far, the feedback you've been getting must feel incredibly rewarding.
JK: If through Trint we can contribute a way to make journalism more efficient so that people can focus on content production and creation rather than simply being stenographers, then that's a pretty great contribution that we as a team and Trint can do.
Journalists expected to do more with less
As you know, the problem is that journalists and many others are all being asked to do more with less, and faster, too. Searching content is the bottleneck. It really hasn't changed amidst all of the changes in journalism over the last 30 years that I've witnessed.
The one part that hasn't changed is how we get the content out of our recordings. And that means that you can't get anything done until you find your quote or sound bite or click whatever you want to call it and what Trint does is condense that workflow massively.
It's really gratifying the kind of e-mails and tweets you see that we're getting on our Twitter feed, It's really really fun to see and really rewarding to see people get it.
Audio transcription with people who speak with accented English
Q: How will Trint work with people whose first language is English but who have a heavy regional accent?
JK: That's actually a really smart question. It works really well and if you look at Trustpilot or our Twitter feed, you will see we get a ton of love.
But the truth is we also get people who think that Trint doesn’t work. They can be quite belligerent in their letters to us, saying you know this product isn't what it claims to be on the box.
There are only two reasons why people would say that. One is they recorded bad audio, which could be from a Skype call, from a noisy coffee shop with music, or from the back of a lecture hall on their iPhone or Android from 100 feet from the speaker. That kind of audio won't work with machine learning. And that's an education. But the other is that it is heavy regional accents.
It will work with North American, British and Australian English. But with heavily accented English, you probably won’t be happy with the results. With Scottish and Welsh, we will eventually look at doing those.
But they are small markets and we're a small company, and you have to be quite harsh about where are you going to put your resources at the early stage. For us, it's a matter of prioritizing our markets. We've got to pay our bills.
Find Jeff Koffman on LinkedIn.
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