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December 2, 2005

Transcribing Podcasts

Michael Arrington

44 comments »

Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 blog found a company that is tackling one of the opportunities I mentioned in an earlier post - providing transcriptions of recordings to podcasters so that they can post searchable text along with the audio file.

CastingWords is not live yet, although they have a landing page up with some limited search capabilities and an email address for inquiries. Eric spoke with the company and gathered addtional information - apparently they are leveraging Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to produce human-created transcriptions (with software cleanup) of podcasts.

We’re a super early stage startup - the idea is to sell search ads against the keywords in the transcriptions, which we generate using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ( http://mturk.com) and some whizzy software. But we need capital to pay all those MTurk workers, so in the next few weeks we’ll be opening a store. It will allow Podcasters to purchase transcriptions of their shows. We’ll do the transcriptions and give them a full transcription - not just chunks pulled back by the search engine if it happens to index their show. Of course they automatically get listed in the engine, so this arrangement should drive traffic to them, get them transcripts, and get us the cash needed to keep on transcribing…Link

This is a space I’ve been watching, as companies race to provide either human-created or automated solutions.

I was excited by a Wired article on November 30 that discussed two companies, Podzinger and blinkx, that are attempting to automatically scan and transcribe podcasts. But after a review of their services I came away disapointed and decided to wait before reviewing them. Neither are ready for prime time yet.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Tom

    December 2nd, 2005 at 8:58 pm

    I won’t transcribe more than 30 seconds of a podcast for 3 cents, I could just do photos and make 6 cents in that time (well, not me, I’m on dialup right now, I know people who do). Expensive clothing, I guess.

  2. oogle

    December 2nd, 2005 at 10:36 pm

    Very nice. But are these solutions in based incounties which offer low cost labor? The only thing that matters is quality per money.

    Again, quality/money.

    Want me to say it one more time? Nah, just repeat it yourself.

  3. Chuck White

    December 2nd, 2005 at 11:49 pm

    First off, I am sorry about the harshness of this post. But I looked, in vain, for M Arrington’s email, and it was nowhere to be found, which means he is okay with this approach, which means, in fact, he is okay with attacks on his manhood.

    This is not a post about this article. It’s a post about Webcrunch. Or Techcrunch. Or whatever it is called.

    The more I see these Web “2.0″ apps the more I am amazed at the buzz surrounding them. Sorry, folks, this stuff is so, umm, 2001? I wrote an “AJAX” app (a really disgusting acronym if I’ve ever heard one) years ago. It involved what I called Dynamic XSL, and it was not anything new, even then. Yes, it involved the Ajax-related xml requests, but back then, it involved only IE, so I guess nobody cared. In fact, I did a fairly long tutorial for it for IBM.

    I love the fact that Firefox has offered an alternative to IE, but it doesn’t change one simple fact. IE has been an API for browser developers for at least five years.

    In fact, I first wrote about this fact years ago, when I wrote IE 5 Developer’s Guide for IDG Books.

    Why is it that now that Firefox has joined the fray (with different DOM implementations), five years later, that we’re all excited? Cuz they’re not Microsoft? Isn’t that sort of a sick mentality? Doesn’t that ignore a lot of interesting research and work from people?

    Hey, I’m no fan of Microsoft. BIll Gates has never given me a reason to live. But this notion that this is all new is a heresy.

    Ajax with MS is NOT Ajax with Mozilla, and we still are dealing with different DOM implementations.

    So carry on all you want. It’s obvious, Mr Harrington, that you are a lawyer, and not a programmer. Have you, like I have, had to worry about programming for a website with 60 million regular users? No, I didn’t think so, and I know so simply by reading your crap.
    M
    ost of us programmers are not only NOT wowed by “RIGGIBODDY 1.0 alpha”, or whatever newfangled website, we know that idiots like you started the first Death of the Web.

    I can guarantee you this. There are a lot of developers in this world who will not be willing to see marketing types and lawyers do it again. I know this, because I see friends of mind freeze in their shoes whenever I espouse an idea.

    Web 2.0.

    Yes, it will happen. But it won’t be because of hype. It will because of sensible applications. Not stupid ass representations of MS OUTLOOK, or some flash based model of Flickr.

    Again, my apologies. You don’t have a link to your email where I can just rant, so I assume you want your readers to see this.

    So. Let’s have some fun!

  4. Chuck White

    December 2nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm

    Ok. That was a little harsh. My apologies.

  5. Jeremy Pepper

    December 3rd, 2005 at 12:04 am

    With all the talk about how companies need to monitor blogs, people forget that podcasts can be just as harmful to a company but are not as trackable. This should be a great service for corporate America.

  6. Michael Arrington

    December 3rd, 2005 at 12:24 am

    Chuck,

    My email is up on the sidebar of the blog near the top “request a profile”. I’ve also added a link on the “about michael arrington” link, also on the left side bar.

    I won’t address your particular concerns, other than to say that you can’t expect people to engage with you in an open minded way when you attack personally like this. I wish you had said everything you did, but without the personal attacks. Someone with your background could really contribute to the conversation and help me understand more about the technologies behind the companies and products I write about.

    I agree that I am not a technical person, and writing techcrunch has been a journey of discovery and learning for me. A lot of smart people have helped me along the way. Remember that this is just a blog, and I’m just a guy with a computer. I don’t try to be anything else.

  7. Erik Schwartz

    December 3rd, 2005 at 5:25 am

    I’m not sure why this is a viable business.

    If I had a podcast that I wanted to sell ads against I would already be stuffing the meta data with relevent sections of the transcript. It just seems that if a podcaster wants a transcription they are better off doing it themselves than hiring someone to do it.

    You’re a lawyer Michael, how is this company any different than a court reporter service? Unless you’re going to do automated keyword exatraction, how are you going to be able to do this cheaper than a court reporter does? My recolection is court reporters are not cheap.

  8. Erik Schwartz

    December 3rd, 2005 at 5:41 am

    On point…

    How is what you are proposing different than:

    http://www.escriptionist.com/transcription-rates/

    They charge between 1.50 and 3.00 per minute and claim to be the cheapest guys out there.

    Outsourcing is going to be tough if you expect them to understand idiomatic english.

  9. John Furrier

    December 3rd, 2005 at 6:34 am

    Transcripts are very important to have with Podcasts. I’ve been providing transcripts on some of my podcasts. They are difficult to implement with an automated tool. Whoever does this well (speach to text) hits a nice home run. First call me I’ll be a beta tester at PodTech.net

  10. Michael Arrington

    December 3rd, 2005 at 9:34 am

    Erik,

    I am thinking of this more from a cost basis. I’d imagine that you could hire people in the US (students, etc.) for $10/hour to do this type of work. Assuming they were productively transcribing half the time, that is still only $.33 per minute. Use labor from the Phillipines or India and this price would decrease dramatically. Tack on a reasonable profit margin, and you have a business.

    Mike

  11. David Evans

    December 3rd, 2005 at 9:47 am

    This is a short term solution. What about Talkr.com? Why transcribe when the voice engines are getting better and better?

  12. Migs

    December 3rd, 2005 at 10:14 am

    That’s already being done here (Philippines) for medical and legal transcription. Of course those are more valuable per word.

  13. Michael Arrington

    December 3rd, 2005 at 10:20 am

    David,

    I agree, the shelf life on this product is probably only a few years. Talkr is great (one of my first reviews here at TechCrunch), but it turns written word into spoken word. What podcasters need is a transcript of the recording, so increase readership and to get the data into the search engines.

  14. Erik Schwartz

    December 3rd, 2005 at 10:24 am

    My point is only that there is an established price, set in the marketplace, for transcription services. Those already in the industry have a vested interest in pushing down the costs. If you could hire college students to do this on the cheap it seems that they would have already done it.

    I agree that transcriptions are hugely important to podcasters. I just don’t see a new industry here. Big names will hire it out, little guys will do it themselves (if they know what’s good for them).

  15. mitch

    December 3rd, 2005 at 10:30 am

    How hard could it be to just write your own transcript? I dont see the neeed to hire people to do it for you.

  16. Ken King | Enablr

    December 3rd, 2005 at 11:40 am

    Comments #7 and #15 suggest that podcasters do their own transcription. For many, that is the right answer: it comes down to opportunity cost and comparative advantage.

    Professionals with appropriate equipment and software can transcribe things more efficiently. It’s up to each person or business to decide whether the opportunity cost of doing it themselves is less than or greater than the cost of outsourcing.

    Sadly, for many the answer may be that transcription is not justified at all, which would rob many of us of access to their thoughts and reduce our ability to find their podcast.

    I also agree with comment #14 - transcription is a relatively mature industry that already makes regular use of offshore labour, and even so the market rate is $1/minute or more. I go into some of the reasons why on our blog.

  17. testboy

    December 3rd, 2005 at 2:05 pm

    4 cents for transcribing 20 seconds … that’s not enough.

  18. Joel Strellner

    December 4th, 2005 at 1:00 am

    I was playing with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I think yesterday or possibly the day before, but either way this company had a transcription go through and I figured for 3 or 4 cents I would transcribe their 15 second clip — after all I was just playing with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

    Well, I was severely pissed off after spending 5 to 10 minutes transcribing the clip exactly as it was spoken and finding out that it was declined.

    If you are going to pay only a few pennies to have someone transcribe something, don’t decline it unless it is completely wrong. My transcription was exact and it was declined.

    I don’t think that this company will last a year if they do that to people. I will never transcribe for them again because they may decide to decline it for no reason.

    Personally I am hoping that someone will come up with a good app that can listen to podcasts and then do a descent job transcribing it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just legible and comprehendible.

  19. Michael Eisenberg

    December 4th, 2005 at 4:36 am

    You can see a version of this in play at http://www.seekingalpha.com. They are transcribing quarterly conference calls by public companies and making them searchable. Not podcasts, but a good step.

  20. Kris Stark

    December 4th, 2005 at 4:46 am

    Have you heard of Podscope? http://www.podscope.com/
    The technology they use, RadioEars , does what I believe you are looking for.

    Radio EarsTM (from http://www.tveyes.com/)
    Uses advanced speaker independent software to index and output a speech to text system in real time. The system is designed to accept virtually any audio source including but not limited to TV, Radio, Internet broadcasts and telephony. The system offers real - time alerts against any of these audio sources.

    Podscope is nice in that it allows you to subscribe to a search term via rss.

  21. Jon

    December 4th, 2005 at 2:56 pm

    Nice troll ‘Chuck White’.

    Crap like that comment should be deleted from this site.

  22. Glenn Santos

    December 5th, 2005 at 12:21 am

    We’re going to try our hand at this here in our corner of the world.

    I also agree that this service can be gotten for cheap, even cheaper than the current rates with medical and legal services out there and with the same quality as well.

  23. Kim Bryant

    December 8th, 2005 at 2:48 pm

    I have been dabbling in podcasts for a short while and find it very valuable to have them transcribed. I use Kate Smalley’s services at Connecticut Secretary, http://www.connecticutsecretary.com for those of you who are interested, and I have found her services to be the most reasonable and effective in my searches. I don’t understand what is so complicated about the process.

    I give her my podcasts in either mp3 or WAV format, through her server or uploaded to mine, and in a day or two I get a completed transcript.

    It just isn’t worth my time to be sitting for hours at end typing my own transcripts when I can hire her to do them and go out and make money running my business and generating new accounts.

    The transcripts put on my webpage are invaluable for getting search engine traffic and allowing visitors to learn more about my services, plus those with hearing problems love to have the transcript to read.

    Take Care,

    Kim

  24. dada veloso

    April 9th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    I am a stay-at-home mother who provides full-time home-based podcast transcription services. This arrangement affords me the chance to have a rewarding career and not be remiss in my duties as a mother and wife. This way, I do not have to sacrifice career over family. At home, I can be hands-on in both fields.

    I just went out to look for an avenue where I can capitalize on my strengths and earn a decent living out of it. I saw the opportunity in podcast transcription, because I have the facility for the language, the love for research, and the attention to detail that this work calls for.

    While I know that there are established transcription companies out there, my edge is that I am operating a personal, dedicated service. I am not threat to them because I believe the market is big enough to accommodate a single venture such as mine. Also, I can give a level of focus and time that no one else can. Rest assured I can meet your deadlines and still produce quality transcriptions because there is nothing else that preoccupies my time.

    Because I am not otherwise employed, I can devote all my time to this endeavor, and I am eager to start as soon as possible. If you deem me worthy, my services are there for the asking. All I ask is that you give me a try and feature me as well so I can generate some level of awareness and have a small share of the market.

  25. sherwin

    April 16th, 2006 at 12:16 am

    PodClerk.com offers podcasts transcription service, started just a few months ago and now drawing more and more clients.

    Try it out, fee is minimal with, usually, 24 hours turn-around.

  26. e24trans

    February 14th, 2007 at 12:54 am

    e24 transcription is now offering monthly subscription based transcription service for podcasters. It is FREE to try!

    We have 3 flexible plans to choose from: Start Plan, Pro Plan and Pro Plus

    Once Subscribed, e24 Transcribers will Wait, Listen and Transcribe the podcast on a regular basis. And the transcripts will be delivered within 24 hrs to the podcasters.

    Know more about our service at http://transcription.e24tech.com/subscription

  27. poesia

    February 22nd, 2007 at 6:54 am

    Grande sito!!

  28. superman

    February 23rd, 2007 at 9:37 am

    luogo fine, sapete..

  29. nata

    February 24th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    Desidero appena dire che e un luogo ben cotto

  30. racconti

    February 28th, 2007 at 10:02 am

    Luogo molto buon:) Buona fortuna!

  31. filmati

    March 1st, 2007 at 11:43 am

    Interessieren. SEHR interessant! ;)

  32. alessandra

    March 2nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    9 su 10! Ottenerlo! Siete buoni!

  33. suonerie

    March 3rd, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    Du musst ein Fachmann sein - wirklich guter Aufstellungsort, den du hast!

  34. offerte

    March 7th, 2007 at 3:31 am

    pagine piuttosto informative, piacevoli =)

  35. juventus

    March 9th, 2007 at 5:58 am

    Interesting comments.. :D

  36. venezia

    March 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    Luogo interessante. Info molto importante, grazie molto!

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