hello everyone marco montemagno here the
tech alchemist and today with me David
finally the co-founder and CEO of speech
but hi Dave how you going hey Marco how
are you great to be here as I told you
I’ve the most horrible surname to
pronounce monkeymod know is something
impossible to pronounce so I’ve been
asking a day before to begin how do you
pronounce finally be because it sounds
like a European surname or you you from
us well what’s your uh yeah yeah it is
from from Europe my great-great-great
grandparents moved here and we’ve been
here ever since but that is where it’s
wrong alright so Dave today with you I
would like to talk about several topics
and I I would love to start from this
transcription ward where speech buddies
is doing its business now and for
community following the tech alchemist
they know that every time I upload an
episode there is a full transcription
and that trans the transcription i am
using it both in the post and also
inside YouTube to get the subtitling so
it’s very very useful and there are
several reasons I want to talk today
with you Dave about why transcription is
useful and I’m doing that transcription
with speech but so I’m a golf Lee
interests conflict yeah I love to talk
about products and services that i’m
using so I’ve been doing interview with
user testing and so all the services
that worked I think it’s very good to to
share that knowledge because other
business can have the same need so um
let’s start talking about transcription
market first what we talking about and
why did you start with with speech but
how is the transcription industry in
yeah yeah so um we started speechpad
because we were experiencing bad
transcriptions ourselves and we wanted
to fix that problem you know actually
we’re getting these voicemails
transcribed and you would think even
that you could get really high quality
machine based transcriptions for that
but it turns out that it’s still quite
hard to get a super high quality
transcription especially when there’s
background noise accents multiple people
speaking things like that so that’s why
we started it and we looked at the
market and it turns out that the market
is a twenty thirty billion dollar plus
market opportunity and and it’s an
industry that’s been around for a long
time and it’s been quite hard to get
transcriptions done easily and quickly
over the internet so that was kind of
our premise really big market was a
problem that was very personal to us and
we thought there was an opportunity to
disrupt it with a great internet based
offering well we we started prototyping
in 2009 and we spent quite a while
prototyping the software and then we
really started scaling it up about two
years ago is when we really put some
muscle into it right I remember I don’t
know five years ago seven years ago
actually remember when YouTube launched
and the funny thing is that i remember
the first videos that I’ve been doing
and I need the transcript and
transcription what I was doing was or
finding a freelance and then he was
transcribing everything and then I found
some someone editing the video to put
all the subtitling any tools I don’t
know one month to do the job it was
really long and painful so when when
this kind of services like speech but
started to came out I think you guys saw
the huge problem and
the feeling of the getting a
transcription is not so horrible anymore
but it’s a smooth process where you just
upload the video and so on can you
explain us for people who doesn’t know
speech well how does it work from the
beginning to the end yeah yeah
absolutely so we use a mix of humans and
some computer based technology to
deliver the high quality transcriptions
that we do essentially you can record an
audio or video on your your iPhone your
Android device you can record it you
know on your PC record on the phone
however you’re recording it some people
also do professional video production
and and you know record things that way
so you’ve got your audio or video you
come to our website at speechpad.com we
make it really easy to upload audios and
videos and just a wide variety of
formats you upload your files we take
those files and send them out to
thousands of transcriber zwi literally
have a internal system where we have
thousands of people working on
transcriptions they do the work and then
it comes back to us we proofread it
potentially do a little bit of editing
and then that transcript appears in your
account on the website you get an email
notifying you that it’s there now we
also of course support ftp upload and a
web services upload or customers that
are really high volume described like
that sounds very easy you know from my
point of view because I just typically
just upload a video on youtube go on
speech but copy and paste the URL then I
say the yes order and then I I don’t
hold my prescription one day one wicked
depends the you can choose the the
timing right to them yeah yeah exactly
and customers can choose 24 hours 48
hour they can choose one week turnaround
obviously different prices for those
different turnaround times but I think
one of the big things we focused on was
how can we make it really really easy
where it truly is what you’re
you upload your audio or video as far as
the customer is concerned that’s all you
have to do and then you get a really
great transcript back in the time frame
that you request it now behind the
scenes we’re doing a lot of work
obviously we’re you know spell checking
where we have rules or looking at the
files we have audio and video conversion
so that all of our trans drivers can
play the audio or video you know
different speeds things like that
depending on what you uploaded but again
that’s all behind the scenes we try and
make it really just easy for customers
audio and video in great text app oh you
can upload audio and video in many
different formats so it could be mp3 wav
files WMA can be different video of dads
you know because one of the problems
that we saw where the customers was just
a variety of audio and video formats
they were that they were working with
and uh you know that are in this space
you’ve really got to pick a very
specific format to work with where’s
with our site you know we really focused
on making audio and video acquisition
that’s the process of getting audio and
video into the system really easy so the
customer can just take whatever they
have get that into the system and then
we take it from there and um how could
you recruit so many people willing to
transcribe because if you ask to me to
transcribe something it I I would kill
myself hahaha is one of the most boring
thing that you can imagine your life
from what my point of view maybe it’s
super funny but probable w is horrible
so how could ya get so many people
transfer the transcribing well it turns
out that first of all there are many
people already know how to do
transcription in the world so a lot of
them are professional transcribers or
their paralegals or folks who have a lot
of experience listening to audio and
hi ke Beng real like quickly and with
high accuracy so you know at this point
we have such a brand and awareness in
the market that a lot of people come to
us and want to do transcription work for
us and then of course we test them and
evaluate their skill set and make sure
that that they can do the work but when
we were starting out what we did is we
started on a platform called Amazon
Mechanical Turk and Mechanical Turk is
this marketplace from an Amazon that is
intended for doing these small units of
work and we started putting a
transcription work out there and that
helped us get our initial base of
transcribers now of course we have many
people that come to us directly and want
to do transcription work but that’s how
we you know that’s how we get started
you kick it off and another curiosity I
saw them I just you know I’m very
curious about a service that is very
smooth from the customer point of view
but I imagine is very complicated bi in
the same so I I would like to understand
me better how how it works what’s the
percentage of the service is human power
and what’s the percentages automatic
algorithm and so on yeah all of the
transcription itself is done by humans
so you’re always getting at a human
being who is doing the transcription now
we have some other capabilities like
time stamping where we insert time codes
into the transcripts we have
capabilities for taking the text and
outputting it at certain formats so
these kinds of things are done by the
machine if you will but the actual
transcription is done by a human because
humans are great at listening and
recognizing audio and turning that into
something written you people are really
really good at that it’s so we make it
easy for them to do that kind of work
and then we take care of all the other
stuff
conversion of the audio and video into
the right format the checking the rules
you know so a bunch of the other things
that are often time consuming we do that
with computers but the you know the high
quality transcription that’s always done
by person and the person do the
transcription obviously get a cat or get
written a compensation of in a
percentage way I imagined yeah and so
the way we do that is the transcriber
czar compensated for their work we have
an equation we call it transcription
plus review equals the final price that
we’re paying so the higher quality the
transcription is the lower or the less
fee that we spend on review you know if
there are some errors in the
transcription we’re spending more on the
reviews so those two things tend to
balance each other out so that we can
ensure we’re delivering a really
high-quality work product to the
customer and that’s kind of how the
system works so you know if you’re a
good driver who’s doing a lot of work
you know one time you might be doing a
bunch of transcriptions at another time
you’re doing a bunch of reviews but
you’re reviewing someone else’s work so
the system has this really nice
equilibrium and this nice market effect
you know this network effect where the
more transcribes we get the more
customers we get and the more customers
we get we build up the transcriber base
so we’re always building up more and
more customers and more and more
transcriber zand that kind of gives us
this equilibrium you know growth in the
in the market as we go on another thing
that i was curious about dave is is the
following sometimes I just shoot a video
and I need a very fast inscription so I
go on speech button and say I needed 24
hours and I’m ready to pay higher price
but I need it fast and I get it in 24
hours and I always think how the hell
could they transcribe 40 minutes maybe
one hour video like this so fast and so
in a way so such a career a correct way
how can you handle this i mean with
different clients different languages
different customers yeah yeah so um just
the way you think about the Amazon Cloud
let’s say Amazon Web Services letting
companies scale their compute
requirements on demand we provide a
similar capability for scaling uh the
human isn’t yet workforce on demand so
we are managing the workforce so we sort
we can sort of see okay here’s how much
work there is you know there’s more and
more we know there’s a spike and so we
alert the transcriber is that there is
more work they come in take those jobs
and get it done now in the case of
long-form video like what you are
talking about we do some time and make
that into a couple of pieces so say you
have a 60 minute video we might have two
people work on that file at the same
time so that way you know in the say a
12 hour period we’re having two people
work in parallel and then in theory
someday we could have 60 people work in
parallel on one minute pieces of audio
and get a 60 minute transcription done
in the time it takes one person you know
to do one minute of audio so we could
good theoretically be doing an hour of
audio or video in an hour what are the
main reasons in your opinion day but for
companies and for people doing business
online to add transcriptions because a
lot of cold eggs are a lot of companies
i’m talking with they really under
estimating in my opinion the power of
transcription in my my opinion is clear
because i see for SEO reason for several
reasons but what what are your reasons
that the most important reasons why
transcription should be added in any
kind of project yeah so actually our
biggest and fastest grow
a vertical is something called video SEO
and the advantage of doing that is that
the text from that video is then indexed
by Google and Bing and other search
engines and so that increases their
rankings and drive more traffic to their
website so you know the great thing
about video like the video we’re doing
right now is it’s very interactive it’s
very dynamic and people love to do it
people love Vidya the challenge for the
search engines is making this kind of
content available in a meaningful way
the search engines can’t find this video
as easily so when we provide a customer
with the transcription and they put that
on their site it’s really easy for the
search engines to index it and and how
do you relate with for instance YouTube
offering now the automatic transcription
obviously older is all automatic I guess
it’s not human also because most of the
time is totally wrong by the way but how
do right with it and yeah we love it
when people try other solutions like
that because customers come back to us
and say we tried the automated stuff or
we tried another solution and we need
the quality that speechpad delivers and
so the real difference in what we
provide is that we’re always providing
very high quality transcriptions so what
you hear and what you what people are
saying that’s actually what you get
you’re not getting a bunch of other
words that people didn’t say so you’re
getting a very high quality work product
tell me again Dave how can you do the
quote quality control how can you be so
arm so focused on quality control what
what’s to do to what do you do to grant
it so this the way say a Bay has
rankings when you sell an item and you
get feedback on that thank you for our
transcription rating system the same way
so every time a transcriber does a
transcription we review that
transcription and they get a score or we
make it really easy for the prince
drivers to see any mistakes they made so
I think the first thing is that helps
them improve over time secondly we paid
people based on the quality of their
work so the better the fewer mistakes
they make the more they get paid and
then third this review process results
in a score and so over time France
bribers you know might be doing hundreds
or thousands of transcriptions and
they’re building up the score just like
you do on ebay or other marketplaces by
the way of my you were speaking with
thinking that an additional advantage
and benefit that I see in having a very
good transcription is that when I upload
the good transcription on YouTube for
instance I get a better translation
because then you can use the Google
translation tool if the transcription is
horrible then you have an orrible
translation so this is also another
interesting point they what are your top
advices to company willing to have a
transcription done if Annie I mean what
your what are your tips to to do to help
companies having good transcriptions out
of of their work yeah so I think one of
the biggest things people can do is set
up a regular schedule to do videos and
it doesn’t have to be hours and hours of
video it could literally be you know we
work with a company called SEO Moz which
provides software for SEO they do
something called a whiteboard Friday
it’s a relatively short piece of audio
oh they do it every Friday and they
share tips and tricks with the you know
with their customers and that’s a really
compelling way for a company to create
some content it’s easy to create it’s
quick to create and then the
transcription gets done quickly you put
that up on the web and all of a sudden
you’re getting a lot more pages indexed
you know in Google or things so I think
that’s one really great thing the other
thing is customers may already have
video assets that they can work with so
a lot of people have recorded a video
about their product launch or an
interview with their head of engineering
or their CTO or you know a video with a
customer that they did in the past
that’s all great content you don’t
necessarily have to create new content
you can get that transcribed and all of
a sudden you’re getting a double value
from that content you already filled
from the past so there’s a lot of
content customers are already have in
the form of audio and video that you can
get transcribed and start getting ranked
for in the search in this is cool
because you can use also all your
archive so I never thought about that so
it is very very smart by the way I had
rent Fishkin guest at tech alchemist and
really appreciate his job all right and
about format no problem because you say
that you transcribe any kind of format
so it’s no problem to worry about
particular format which language speech
but can transcribe on English we’re
heavily focused on English we’re
starting to do some Spanish now we have
a lot of demand from customers to do
Spanish we certainly get a lot of
inquiries for French German Japanese
Korean lots of other languages so we’re
looking at adding those next year all
right I’m waiting for your Chinese
version that will be a big fun we yeah
we have a lot of customers who request
that and what we tend to do is run you
know we do run some of that through the
system but to do it in really high
volume will need to scale up the
workforce or for those up their
languages right also because I always
thought a few years ago I had the video
translated I thinking six seven
languages but I couldn’t understand that
you know Mandarin or so I had no idea it
was good or bad so this is another way
my yeah a lot of people want to do the
other languages for translation purposes
or they have video content
and they want to do subtitling that’s a
big category for us or closed captioning
for about you know added to the video so
that’ll that’s something we’ll spend
more and more time on next year right
one thing that i did a mention about
speech bar which i think is very useful
is that when i download the
transcription i get several four months
so i can have in tikz i can have the
HTML RTF so several formats and is
useful if i have to use it on different
media for subtitling or in a doc word or
something like that right Dave a few
minutes more but I want to talk about
Big Data we do to you you recently wrote
a good post that I suggested the tech
alchemist community on Forbes if I’m if
I’m not wrong you you are a contributor
on with the blog enforcer where you talk
about several not only speech but you
have a long career as a successful
entrepreneur and writer so guys just go
there and watch all the Dave job because
otherwise we stay here talking for hours
what but how about we Ditka me what’s
happening right now yeah so you know if
you think about all the take it in the
context of speech pad you think about
all the audio and video that we work
with every day you know thousands and
thousands of files upload you can
imagine looking at the transcripts for
keywords you can do other analytics on
all this audio and video and that can
give you some insights let’s take an
example you know let’s say an insurance
company might have tens of thousands of
transcripts of recorded statements that
they’re taking from their clients over
the course of a year now imagine that
they then analyze all of those tens of
thousands of transcripts looking for
trends in the words and finding things
like left turn is always associated with
you know a certain issue that they know
of in their system a certain accident
type or a certain kind of instrument
playing for what have you I’m just
giving that as an example so you know
that kind of analytics based on these
huge data sets is a good example of
what’s going on in big data and that’s a
you know just kind of shows the power of
taking lots of data that might not have
been in the right format to work with in
the past so audio in its native format
very hard to work with but once you
convert it into text you can run all of
these incredible analytics on it to get
these business insights that could you
know reduce your business costs or drive
more sales or what have you so that’s
kind of the power of big data and for my
column you know I tend to talk to lots
of different startups and different
companies in the space and then I write
about things that I I see in the space
and emerging friends by the way Dave I
always ask to tech alchemist guests to
suggest their favorite 2 / 3 website or
apps that they can’t live without for
business of course so for productivity
or for the something that you think gosh
I can’t live without debt and for
business for online business and digital
business absolutely i recommend to use
that kind of app so do you have your
favorite 2 / 3 yeah well I’m gonna take
a little different angle on that and I’m
going to tell you about my experience
using a Mac when I was 16 I went to work
at a company called Microsoft and you
know I really learned I heard about that
Microsoft I think yeah I heard it yeah
yeah yeahs and Lisbon you know the
company is is huge and they have all
kinds of incredible productivity
software windows 8 coming out things
like that so I love the you know recent
work that they’re doing but I have to
say a little while ago I was like I’m
going to try being a Mac user and the
most amazing thing to me is my my
presentations look really great people
look at my slide deck nigga wow great
design work and
I never thought of myself as a designer
you know I think of myself as a product
guy I think of my so you know as a
technologist I occasionally do sales
with some of our customers things like
that but I never thought about being a
great designer and one of the amazing
things for me is I too can produce stuff
that looks really good and and that’s
been really transformative for me so
that’s a you know one thing I can’t live
without the other is not so much a nap
but I’m an iron man so you know I just
did an event called Iron Man france in
june and if you think about a people who
are into sports and athletics we are big
data people so we love collecting data
about ourselves about calorie intake and
our exercise habits and how many
calories were burning and how many feet
we climbed on the you know the bike
course and all kinds of other data and
the great thing for me is I can collect
all that data using a couple hundred
dollar gps watch from garmin and i’m
collecting immense amounts of data about
my activities and then i’m uploading
them into the haha and i get to see
everything about my activities so those
you know that’s really an amazing thing
to me that i could collect such granular
data and then view it & and get insights
from it so those are really the two
things that I can’t live with that this
is a by the way is very cool this trend
called quantitative sell so the
possibility that you have to measure
yourself with all the tools Fitbit and
so on the next leg web conference for
people in in Europe in December would be
only about the Internet of Things and
all about this kind of stuff so it’s a
absolutely interesting can you imagine
David that in and the notes for the
interview today about you I was writing
down avid three outlet and violinist
this was wanting an inventor co-inventor
on 15 US patents
I thought gosh 15 years methods a lot
you know so well I important to stress
co-inventor because you know whenever
you’re inventing something it’s a lot of
really a team coming together to turn
that invention into reality it’s one
thing to think of that hey let’s build a
transcription service that’s going to be
really easy it’s another thing to make
that a reality for a lot of customers
and so you’ve got to have a lot of
people coming together as a team to you
know to make that vision into reality
Dave last question and then I’ll let you
go what wiII happen in the next couple
of years in the transcription industry I
mean videos are exploding so I imagine
that the more videos there are the more
transcription the there will be but
there is any particular trend in your in
this industry that you can yeah I think
that’s right I think video really is
going to be a huge source of growth
first of all because it’s a lot easier
to capture video you know we’ve all got
a device like this the device where it’s
really easy to capture video and so
that’s great in it just an you know huge
growth in the amount of video and also
people are putting it online I mean
that’s one of the big differences I
think we take that for granted that of
course i can upload my video and put it
on the internet but if you think about
it that’s a relatively recent change
which is not just that i could capture
it but that i had enough bandwidth so
that i could upload that and put it
somewhere where other people could get
to it and so that change is really you
know different yeah disruptive in what’s
going on so that combined with a bunch
of regulatory stuff around requirements
for closed captioning to make video
accessible and just the sheer volume of
audio and video being put on the net I
think that’s where a lot of the growth
is going to come from and you know as a
company our goal is on continuing the
scale and provide work for more and more
people there’s a lot of money
in the country right now and so you know
we view one of the things we’re doing as
creating a place where people can do
productive work get paid for it have a
career path potentially and so those its
success you know that’s what we’re going
to be all about for the next few years
of continuing the scale the business
while maintaining high quality thank you
so much David David finally the
co-founder of speech but and good luck
for everything keep in touch Marco thanks so much
tech alchemist and today with me David
finally the co-founder and CEO of speech
but hi Dave how you going hey Marco how
are you great to be here as I told you
I’ve the most horrible surname to
pronounce monkeymod know is something
impossible to pronounce so I’ve been
asking a day before to begin how do you
pronounce finally be because it sounds
like a European surname or you you from
us well what’s your uh yeah yeah it is
from from Europe my great-great-great
grandparents moved here and we’ve been
here ever since but that is where it’s
wrong alright so Dave today with you I
would like to talk about several topics
and I I would love to start from this
transcription ward where speech buddies
is doing its business now and for
community following the tech alchemist
they know that every time I upload an
episode there is a full transcription
and that trans the transcription i am
using it both in the post and also
inside YouTube to get the subtitling so
it’s very very useful and there are
several reasons I want to talk today
with you Dave about why transcription is
useful and I’m doing that transcription
with speech but so I’m a golf Lee
interests conflict yeah I love to talk
about products and services that i’m
using so I’ve been doing interview with
user testing and so all the services
that worked I think it’s very good to to
share that knowledge because other
business can have the same need so um
let’s start talking about transcription
market first what we talking about and
why did you start with with speech but
how is the transcription industry in
yeah yeah so um we started speechpad
because we were experiencing bad
transcriptions ourselves and we wanted
to fix that problem you know actually
we’re getting these voicemails
transcribed and you would think even
that you could get really high quality
machine based transcriptions for that
but it turns out that it’s still quite
hard to get a super high quality
transcription especially when there’s
background noise accents multiple people
speaking things like that so that’s why
we started it and we looked at the
market and it turns out that the market
is a twenty thirty billion dollar plus
market opportunity and and it’s an
industry that’s been around for a long
time and it’s been quite hard to get
transcriptions done easily and quickly
over the internet so that was kind of
our premise really big market was a
problem that was very personal to us and
we thought there was an opportunity to
disrupt it with a great internet based
offering well we we started prototyping
in 2009 and we spent quite a while
prototyping the software and then we
really started scaling it up about two
years ago is when we really put some
muscle into it right I remember I don’t
know five years ago seven years ago
actually remember when YouTube launched
and the funny thing is that i remember
the first videos that I’ve been doing
and I need the transcript and
transcription what I was doing was or
finding a freelance and then he was
transcribing everything and then I found
some someone editing the video to put
all the subtitling any tools I don’t
know one month to do the job it was
really long and painful so when when
this kind of services like speech but
started to came out I think you guys saw
the huge problem and
the feeling of the getting a
transcription is not so horrible anymore
but it’s a smooth process where you just
upload the video and so on can you
explain us for people who doesn’t know
speech well how does it work from the
beginning to the end yeah yeah
absolutely so we use a mix of humans and
some computer based technology to
deliver the high quality transcriptions
that we do essentially you can record an
audio or video on your your iPhone your
Android device you can record it you
know on your PC record on the phone
however you’re recording it some people
also do professional video production
and and you know record things that way
so you’ve got your audio or video you
come to our website at speechpad.com we
make it really easy to upload audios and
videos and just a wide variety of
formats you upload your files we take
those files and send them out to
thousands of transcriber zwi literally
have a internal system where we have
thousands of people working on
transcriptions they do the work and then
it comes back to us we proofread it
potentially do a little bit of editing
and then that transcript appears in your
account on the website you get an email
notifying you that it’s there now we
also of course support ftp upload and a
web services upload or customers that
are really high volume described like
that sounds very easy you know from my
point of view because I just typically
just upload a video on youtube go on
speech but copy and paste the URL then I
say the yes order and then I I don’t
hold my prescription one day one wicked
depends the you can choose the the
timing right to them yeah yeah exactly
and customers can choose 24 hours 48
hour they can choose one week turnaround
obviously different prices for those
different turnaround times but I think
one of the big things we focused on was
how can we make it really really easy
where it truly is what you’re
you upload your audio or video as far as
the customer is concerned that’s all you
have to do and then you get a really
great transcript back in the time frame
that you request it now behind the
scenes we’re doing a lot of work
obviously we’re you know spell checking
where we have rules or looking at the
files we have audio and video conversion
so that all of our trans drivers can
play the audio or video you know
different speeds things like that
depending on what you uploaded but again
that’s all behind the scenes we try and
make it really just easy for customers
audio and video in great text app oh you
can upload audio and video in many
different formats so it could be mp3 wav
files WMA can be different video of dads
you know because one of the problems
that we saw where the customers was just
a variety of audio and video formats
they were that they were working with
and uh you know that are in this space
you’ve really got to pick a very
specific format to work with where’s
with our site you know we really focused
on making audio and video acquisition
that’s the process of getting audio and
video into the system really easy so the
customer can just take whatever they
have get that into the system and then
we take it from there and um how could
you recruit so many people willing to
transcribe because if you ask to me to
transcribe something it I I would kill
myself hahaha is one of the most boring
thing that you can imagine your life
from what my point of view maybe it’s
super funny but probable w is horrible
so how could ya get so many people
transfer the transcribing well it turns
out that first of all there are many
people already know how to do
transcription in the world so a lot of
them are professional transcribers or
their paralegals or folks who have a lot
of experience listening to audio and
hi ke Beng real like quickly and with
high accuracy so you know at this point
we have such a brand and awareness in
the market that a lot of people come to
us and want to do transcription work for
us and then of course we test them and
evaluate their skill set and make sure
that that they can do the work but when
we were starting out what we did is we
started on a platform called Amazon
Mechanical Turk and Mechanical Turk is
this marketplace from an Amazon that is
intended for doing these small units of
work and we started putting a
transcription work out there and that
helped us get our initial base of
transcribers now of course we have many
people that come to us directly and want
to do transcription work but that’s how
we you know that’s how we get started
you kick it off and another curiosity I
saw them I just you know I’m very
curious about a service that is very
smooth from the customer point of view
but I imagine is very complicated bi in
the same so I I would like to understand
me better how how it works what’s the
percentage of the service is human power
and what’s the percentages automatic
algorithm and so on yeah all of the
transcription itself is done by humans
so you’re always getting at a human
being who is doing the transcription now
we have some other capabilities like
time stamping where we insert time codes
into the transcripts we have
capabilities for taking the text and
outputting it at certain formats so
these kinds of things are done by the
machine if you will but the actual
transcription is done by a human because
humans are great at listening and
recognizing audio and turning that into
something written you people are really
really good at that it’s so we make it
easy for them to do that kind of work
and then we take care of all the other
stuff
conversion of the audio and video into
the right format the checking the rules
you know so a bunch of the other things
that are often time consuming we do that
with computers but the you know the high
quality transcription that’s always done
by person and the person do the
transcription obviously get a cat or get
written a compensation of in a
percentage way I imagined yeah and so
the way we do that is the transcriber
czar compensated for their work we have
an equation we call it transcription
plus review equals the final price that
we’re paying so the higher quality the
transcription is the lower or the less
fee that we spend on review you know if
there are some errors in the
transcription we’re spending more on the
reviews so those two things tend to
balance each other out so that we can
ensure we’re delivering a really
high-quality work product to the
customer and that’s kind of how the
system works so you know if you’re a
good driver who’s doing a lot of work
you know one time you might be doing a
bunch of transcriptions at another time
you’re doing a bunch of reviews but
you’re reviewing someone else’s work so
the system has this really nice
equilibrium and this nice market effect
you know this network effect where the
more transcribes we get the more
customers we get and the more customers
we get we build up the transcriber base
so we’re always building up more and
more customers and more and more
transcriber zand that kind of gives us
this equilibrium you know growth in the
in the market as we go on another thing
that i was curious about dave is is the
following sometimes I just shoot a video
and I need a very fast inscription so I
go on speech button and say I needed 24
hours and I’m ready to pay higher price
but I need it fast and I get it in 24
hours and I always think how the hell
could they transcribe 40 minutes maybe
one hour video like this so fast and so
in a way so such a career a correct way
how can you handle this i mean with
different clients different languages
different customers yeah yeah so um just
the way you think about the Amazon Cloud
let’s say Amazon Web Services letting
companies scale their compute
requirements on demand we provide a
similar capability for scaling uh the
human isn’t yet workforce on demand so
we are managing the workforce so we sort
we can sort of see okay here’s how much
work there is you know there’s more and
more we know there’s a spike and so we
alert the transcriber is that there is
more work they come in take those jobs
and get it done now in the case of
long-form video like what you are
talking about we do some time and make
that into a couple of pieces so say you
have a 60 minute video we might have two
people work on that file at the same
time so that way you know in the say a
12 hour period we’re having two people
work in parallel and then in theory
someday we could have 60 people work in
parallel on one minute pieces of audio
and get a 60 minute transcription done
in the time it takes one person you know
to do one minute of audio so we could
good theoretically be doing an hour of
audio or video in an hour what are the
main reasons in your opinion day but for
companies and for people doing business
online to add transcriptions because a
lot of cold eggs are a lot of companies
i’m talking with they really under
estimating in my opinion the power of
transcription in my my opinion is clear
because i see for SEO reason for several
reasons but what what are your reasons
that the most important reasons why
transcription should be added in any
kind of project yeah so actually our
biggest and fastest grow
a vertical is something called video SEO
and the advantage of doing that is that
the text from that video is then indexed
by Google and Bing and other search
engines and so that increases their
rankings and drive more traffic to their
website so you know the great thing
about video like the video we’re doing
right now is it’s very interactive it’s
very dynamic and people love to do it
people love Vidya the challenge for the
search engines is making this kind of
content available in a meaningful way
the search engines can’t find this video
as easily so when we provide a customer
with the transcription and they put that
on their site it’s really easy for the
search engines to index it and and how
do you relate with for instance YouTube
offering now the automatic transcription
obviously older is all automatic I guess
it’s not human also because most of the
time is totally wrong by the way but how
do right with it and yeah we love it
when people try other solutions like
that because customers come back to us
and say we tried the automated stuff or
we tried another solution and we need
the quality that speechpad delivers and
so the real difference in what we
provide is that we’re always providing
very high quality transcriptions so what
you hear and what you what people are
saying that’s actually what you get
you’re not getting a bunch of other
words that people didn’t say so you’re
getting a very high quality work product
tell me again Dave how can you do the
quote quality control how can you be so
arm so focused on quality control what
what’s to do to what do you do to grant
it so this the way say a Bay has
rankings when you sell an item and you
get feedback on that thank you for our
transcription rating system the same way
so every time a transcriber does a
transcription we review that
transcription and they get a score or we
make it really easy for the prince
drivers to see any mistakes they made so
I think the first thing is that helps
them improve over time secondly we paid
people based on the quality of their
work so the better the fewer mistakes
they make the more they get paid and
then third this review process results
in a score and so over time France
bribers you know might be doing hundreds
or thousands of transcriptions and
they’re building up the score just like
you do on ebay or other marketplaces by
the way of my you were speaking with
thinking that an additional advantage
and benefit that I see in having a very
good transcription is that when I upload
the good transcription on YouTube for
instance I get a better translation
because then you can use the Google
translation tool if the transcription is
horrible then you have an orrible
translation so this is also another
interesting point they what are your top
advices to company willing to have a
transcription done if Annie I mean what
your what are your tips to to do to help
companies having good transcriptions out
of of their work yeah so I think one of
the biggest things people can do is set
up a regular schedule to do videos and
it doesn’t have to be hours and hours of
video it could literally be you know we
work with a company called SEO Moz which
provides software for SEO they do
something called a whiteboard Friday
it’s a relatively short piece of audio
oh they do it every Friday and they
share tips and tricks with the you know
with their customers and that’s a really
compelling way for a company to create
some content it’s easy to create it’s
quick to create and then the
transcription gets done quickly you put
that up on the web and all of a sudden
you’re getting a lot more pages indexed
you know in Google or things so I think
that’s one really great thing the other
thing is customers may already have
video assets that they can work with so
a lot of people have recorded a video
about their product launch or an
interview with their head of engineering
or their CTO or you know a video with a
customer that they did in the past
that’s all great content you don’t
necessarily have to create new content
you can get that transcribed and all of
a sudden you’re getting a double value
from that content you already filled
from the past so there’s a lot of
content customers are already have in
the form of audio and video that you can
get transcribed and start getting ranked
for in the search in this is cool
because you can use also all your
archive so I never thought about that so
it is very very smart by the way I had
rent Fishkin guest at tech alchemist and
really appreciate his job all right and
about format no problem because you say
that you transcribe any kind of format
so it’s no problem to worry about
particular format which language speech
but can transcribe on English we’re
heavily focused on English we’re
starting to do some Spanish now we have
a lot of demand from customers to do
Spanish we certainly get a lot of
inquiries for French German Japanese
Korean lots of other languages so we’re
looking at adding those next year all
right I’m waiting for your Chinese
version that will be a big fun we yeah
we have a lot of customers who request
that and what we tend to do is run you
know we do run some of that through the
system but to do it in really high
volume will need to scale up the
workforce or for those up their
languages right also because I always
thought a few years ago I had the video
translated I thinking six seven
languages but I couldn’t understand that
you know Mandarin or so I had no idea it
was good or bad so this is another way
my yeah a lot of people want to do the
other languages for translation purposes
or they have video content
and they want to do subtitling that’s a
big category for us or closed captioning
for about you know added to the video so
that’ll that’s something we’ll spend
more and more time on next year right
one thing that i did a mention about
speech bar which i think is very useful
is that when i download the
transcription i get several four months
so i can have in tikz i can have the
HTML RTF so several formats and is
useful if i have to use it on different
media for subtitling or in a doc word or
something like that right Dave a few
minutes more but I want to talk about
Big Data we do to you you recently wrote
a good post that I suggested the tech
alchemist community on Forbes if I’m if
I’m not wrong you you are a contributor
on with the blog enforcer where you talk
about several not only speech but you
have a long career as a successful
entrepreneur and writer so guys just go
there and watch all the Dave job because
otherwise we stay here talking for hours
what but how about we Ditka me what’s
happening right now yeah so you know if
you think about all the take it in the
context of speech pad you think about
all the audio and video that we work
with every day you know thousands and
thousands of files upload you can
imagine looking at the transcripts for
keywords you can do other analytics on
all this audio and video and that can
give you some insights let’s take an
example you know let’s say an insurance
company might have tens of thousands of
transcripts of recorded statements that
they’re taking from their clients over
the course of a year now imagine that
they then analyze all of those tens of
thousands of transcripts looking for
trends in the words and finding things
like left turn is always associated with
you know a certain issue that they know
of in their system a certain accident
type or a certain kind of instrument
playing for what have you I’m just
giving that as an example so you know
that kind of analytics based on these
huge data sets is a good example of
what’s going on in big data and that’s a
you know just kind of shows the power of
taking lots of data that might not have
been in the right format to work with in
the past so audio in its native format
very hard to work with but once you
convert it into text you can run all of
these incredible analytics on it to get
these business insights that could you
know reduce your business costs or drive
more sales or what have you so that’s
kind of the power of big data and for my
column you know I tend to talk to lots
of different startups and different
companies in the space and then I write
about things that I I see in the space
and emerging friends by the way Dave I
always ask to tech alchemist guests to
suggest their favorite 2 / 3 website or
apps that they can’t live without for
business of course so for productivity
or for the something that you think gosh
I can’t live without debt and for
business for online business and digital
business absolutely i recommend to use
that kind of app so do you have your
favorite 2 / 3 yeah well I’m gonna take
a little different angle on that and I’m
going to tell you about my experience
using a Mac when I was 16 I went to work
at a company called Microsoft and you
know I really learned I heard about that
Microsoft I think yeah I heard it yeah
yeah yeahs and Lisbon you know the
company is is huge and they have all
kinds of incredible productivity
software windows 8 coming out things
like that so I love the you know recent
work that they’re doing but I have to
say a little while ago I was like I’m
going to try being a Mac user and the
most amazing thing to me is my my
presentations look really great people
look at my slide deck nigga wow great
design work and
I never thought of myself as a designer
you know I think of myself as a product
guy I think of my so you know as a
technologist I occasionally do sales
with some of our customers things like
that but I never thought about being a
great designer and one of the amazing
things for me is I too can produce stuff
that looks really good and and that’s
been really transformative for me so
that’s a you know one thing I can’t live
without the other is not so much a nap
but I’m an iron man so you know I just
did an event called Iron Man france in
june and if you think about a people who
are into sports and athletics we are big
data people so we love collecting data
about ourselves about calorie intake and
our exercise habits and how many
calories were burning and how many feet
we climbed on the you know the bike
course and all kinds of other data and
the great thing for me is I can collect
all that data using a couple hundred
dollar gps watch from garmin and i’m
collecting immense amounts of data about
my activities and then i’m uploading
them into the haha and i get to see
everything about my activities so those
you know that’s really an amazing thing
to me that i could collect such granular
data and then view it & and get insights
from it so those are really the two
things that I can’t live with that this
is a by the way is very cool this trend
called quantitative sell so the
possibility that you have to measure
yourself with all the tools Fitbit and
so on the next leg web conference for
people in in Europe in December would be
only about the Internet of Things and
all about this kind of stuff so it’s a
absolutely interesting can you imagine
David that in and the notes for the
interview today about you I was writing
down avid three outlet and violinist
this was wanting an inventor co-inventor
on 15 US patents
I thought gosh 15 years methods a lot
you know so well I important to stress
co-inventor because you know whenever
you’re inventing something it’s a lot of
really a team coming together to turn
that invention into reality it’s one
thing to think of that hey let’s build a
transcription service that’s going to be
really easy it’s another thing to make
that a reality for a lot of customers
and so you’ve got to have a lot of
people coming together as a team to you
know to make that vision into reality
Dave last question and then I’ll let you
go what wiII happen in the next couple
of years in the transcription industry I
mean videos are exploding so I imagine
that the more videos there are the more
transcription the there will be but
there is any particular trend in your in
this industry that you can yeah I think
that’s right I think video really is
going to be a huge source of growth
first of all because it’s a lot easier
to capture video you know we’ve all got
a device like this the device where it’s
really easy to capture video and so
that’s great in it just an you know huge
growth in the amount of video and also
people are putting it online I mean
that’s one of the big differences I
think we take that for granted that of
course i can upload my video and put it
on the internet but if you think about
it that’s a relatively recent change
which is not just that i could capture
it but that i had enough bandwidth so
that i could upload that and put it
somewhere where other people could get
to it and so that change is really you
know different yeah disruptive in what’s
going on so that combined with a bunch
of regulatory stuff around requirements
for closed captioning to make video
accessible and just the sheer volume of
audio and video being put on the net I
think that’s where a lot of the growth
is going to come from and you know as a
company our goal is on continuing the
scale and provide work for more and more
people there’s a lot of money
in the country right now and so you know
we view one of the things we’re doing as
creating a place where people can do
productive work get paid for it have a
career path potentially and so those its
success you know that’s what we’re going
to be all about for the next few years
of continuing the scale the business
while maintaining high quality thank you
so much David David finally the
co-founder of speech but and good luck
for everything keep in touch Marco thanks so much
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