Matt Mireles thought of the idea for SpeakerText while working with video and audio as a journalist. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik)
SpeakerText has the potential to make video a lot more searchable, useful and navigable. Founder Matt Mireles demoed the video tool at January’s NY Tech Meetup with resounding applause and approval from the audience.
The tool syncs the video track with the transcript and allows you to navigate the video by clicking on different parts of the text.
Perhaps the most useful feature is that if anyone copies the transcript text from the video and pastes it into a blog post, it turns it into a link that goes directly to that moment in the video (a feature that got oos and ahhs at the meetup).
Right now the tool works with YouTube API, and it would be great to see the technology extended to other video platforms. So where does the transcript come from? It integrates with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for one hour of video transcription for $20. Considering most videos are a little over 3 minutes long, that’s not too bad of a price.
Founders Mireles and Björn Liljequist, the CTO, built the tool using only $4,000 and paying two engineers with iPhones. Mireles got the inspiration when he was working with video as a journalist. Mireles, who received an M.S. in journalism from Columbia Journalism School, said that trying to search through video is difficult and this will be able to help it become more searchable.
Here is a great video demo:
Related posts:
- Video: Nate Westheimer on AnyClip: ‘Moments from movies matter’
- Podcast: Interview with Tony Bacigalupo, Mayor of New Work City
- Podcast: SetJam’s Ryan Janssen on how he beat Google in search for just $50,000
- Podcast: Interview with The Deal’s Mary Kathleen Flynn
- Video: Fred Wilson talks trends, advice for startups
