Transcribe Podcasts
December 27th, 2005 | by dnw |Back in October 2005, in a post titled “RSS to Lyrics” I asked the question “how does someone who cannot hear ‘listen’ to a podcast?” To save you going there, here’s the quoted paragraph:
Anyway, how does someone who cannot hear ‘listen’ to a podcast? How does audio get translated to a visual format - preferably easily and seemlessly? And then made mobile? Technology should be able to do this stuff nowadays. And it’d be great if publishers on new media would do what others before them in ‘traditional’ forms of media haven’t and think about these issues at the beginning, or design stage. (note to self - universal design apply to new media?)
Well, it seems other have been thinking similar because over at Podtranscript they are offering a transcription service for podcasts. They are just starting up but their expected prices look reasonable and this should turn out to be a worthwhile service.
To go further on this topic though I really want to pickup on a point I was making in my October 2005 post - with todays technology, transcribing (or at least the process of converting to a text format) should be ’seemless’. And it’s something that ideally we would be thinking about now - at the beginning of podcasting - not later like was done with accessibility and the web.
Okay, so new technology and ways of information distribution come along and their evolution is driven, usually quite rapidly initially, by innovation and pioneer spirit. And this perhaps is needed to push into new territory and get new ideas established.
My hope is that we can learn from our relatively short history in and on the ‘net’ and apply some thinking around the effects new developments will or might have as the emerging technology takes root. How could it effect certain groups of people, certain aspects of some lives? This requires forward-thinking often around the ‘fringe’ of the core of what is actually happening. Looking at the technology from a different context. The last thing we need is to create another divide or more hurdles for people to jump through.
(As an update since writing the above, Cameron Reilly has written about another transcription service, Casting Words, and about transcription services in general in a post I don’t get the fuss about podcast transcription services. Maybe my post here is relevant. Maybe he should try telling a deaf person they can’t partake in his podcast world of rich user-generated media content. Perhaps many startups in the web 1.0 world thought the same way about markup standards and accessibility. In any rate, a look outside our own contexts into the future and into the worlds of others can often change the nature of what appears as immediate ‘fuss’ and even open up worlds of possibilities and even new conversations.)
RSS to Lyrics - http://lifekludger.net/2005/10/27/rss-to-lyrics/
Podtranscript - http://www.podtranscript.com/
via Techcrunch -TechCrunch » Podtranscript to Transcribe Podcasts
What is it with transcription services - I don’t get the fuss about podcast transcription services
Casting Words - http://castingwords.com/
No Responses to “Transcribe Podcasts”
By Swapna on May 1, 2007 | Reply
You raise an extremely relevan tissue when you talk of deaf having no access to the rich world of podcasting.Since listening is the key to this technology as well as the reason for its success,the deaf have no reason and hence no available avenue to access this technology.However,there will be some amongst the deaf who would want to know about what certain podcasts say.A popular podcast like that of Adam Curry will be topics of discussions and hence the deaf will be forced to find out all about it.The idea is,therefore,to post a transcribed copy of the podcast alongwith the podcast.This is not only to reach out to the wider audience comprising the deaf but also helps in getting the page indexed by search engines.Many Podcasting Transcription Companies are flooded with transcription work of this kind and have the requisite expertise cum infrastructure to transcribe podcasts for clients.
By Dave the Lifekludger on May 2, 2007 | Reply
Hi Swapna, thanks for your comment. The issue it seems is that there is no automated way to get audio transcribed to textlike there is text->audio. I think this is an issue because podcasting is often an amateur pursuit - unlike Mr Curry, the majority of podcasters wouldn’t have the wherewithall to provide a transcript. This is why I was focused on finding a seemless way to do transcription, so just like I do with the Talkr service, automatically converting my text blog posts to audio, the reverse could be done with my podcasts.,.(I wish).
Cheers, Dave