Mitch Kapor Leads $600,000 Angel Round In Video Transcription Startup SpeakerText

SpeakerText, a scrappy startup that automates video transcriptions through a combination of clever algorithms and crowdsourcing, raised $600,000 from a group of angel investors led by Mitch Kapor. The other investors include Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Crowdflower CEO Lukas Biewald, Roy Rodenstein, Chris Yeh, and ex-Googler Georges Harik

The challenge most publishers face with video is that it is still hard to find. SpeakerText addresses this issue by automatically transcribing every video in a SEO-friendly format so that videos turn into searchable transcripts. The videos are put through a speech-to-text engine to start, and then broken up into chunks which are sent to remote online transcribers who fix any errors.

The transcription is synced to the video so that if you click on any word or sentence, you get taken to that exact spot in the video. Viewers can also share quotes with links to those spots via email, Twitter, or Facebook. It works pretty well. We tried it for the videos at our last Disrupt conference. I’ve embedded one below with an interview of Kevin Rose.