Member-only story
In Praise of Software Scribes
How Automated Transcriptions Empower Authors and Everyone on the Internet
This post started with me, on my balcony, in -7 degrees Celsius. (19 Fahrenheit.) I was talking to my scribe, the Otter app on my phone. Thousands of years ago, scribes were a luxury afforded only to royalty, although I suspect a Pharoah would not have tolerated such cold weather. I went back inside, exported the text, and put it into a document. Then, I wrote.
There’s plenty to be said of the overarching business opportunity here for transcriptions. Otter raised $10 million in January 2020. Over a decade ago, Rev.com raised millions too. I hope to write about that in a business context one day, but I won’t be doing that in this post. Instead, I’ll look into the opportunity of turning audio and video into writing and my personal experiences with it as a professional author and editorial director.
Enter YouTube’s Transcriptions
Perhaps one of the most useful, and least obvious, tools in YouTube is it also displays its captions in transcript format. I’d consider myself a pretty heavy user of YouTube, and I used it for years without realizing this was possible. Just click the “…” button under a video’s title, click “Open transcript,” and voila.
