Sweetmorn 5 Confusion: The Apostle Sri Syadasti’s Holyday. An Indian Pundit and Prince, born of the Peyotl Tribe, son of Gentle Chief Sun Flower Seed and the squaw Merry Jane. Living embodiment of the Discordian Affirmation. Patron to psychedelic type Discordians.
Syaday
the future of (speech) podcasts
The Podlove project once again leads the way to improve the experience and the way we interact with knowledge and thoughts. With the most current announcement and introduction of transcription-support for podcasts. Click on it right now and try it yourself.
Fulltext-search. Listening to podcasts by reading them. This-is-amazing!
Transcripts are coming
from the Podlove Publisher 2.8 announcement
Transcripts are an incredibly desirable thing to have for podcasts: they allow searching for specific parts, increase searchability by search sites when presented properly and they increase the accessibility of audio content significantly too.
However, transcripts have been considerably difficult to be created and used. Manually created transcripts are costly in terms of time and money and even if you spend the money there has been a lack of technical standards for storing and integrating transcripts into websites in a defined way.
This is now slowly changing: more and more automated speech-to-text systems are becoming available at reasonable costs and they are creating ever better transcripts with more and more languages being supported.
Still, automatic transcripts trail manually created transcripts in terms of accuracy, punctuation and so on but they are increasingly useful when they are primarily used for improving search results or helping you with your internal research when trying to find content in your older episodes.
New services are also coming up to deal with these problems by allowing users to quickly build on automatic transcripts and improve them manually in an assisted fashion. We will soon see a landscape of tools and services that will make creating transcripts easy and cheap enough for more and more podcasters so it’s time to come up with a good integration.
Last but not least, the WebVTT file format has become a de-facto common denominator for passing transcripts along, supporting time codes, speaker identification and a rudimentary set of meta data. While not perfect it’s enough to get a transcript infrastructure up and running and Podlove is leading the way.