SpeakerText: (from left) Tyler Kieft, Matt Mireles & Matt Swanson.
Writers are told to write what they know. Well, former journalist Matt Mireles knew there was a fundamental problem in the way the internet reads video —it doesn’t — so he wrote an entire company to rectify the problem. Called SpeakerText, his team hopes to forever change the way wordsmiths integrate video into their work.
“I’d been a journalist and gone from being a writer to being an interactive storyteller,” 29-year old Mireles says of SpeakerText’s roots. After branching into photography, Mireles then evolved into video, and found a problem: “I wanted quotes to link back to exact moments in the video, but audio and video are not searchable. They’re part of the ‘dark web.’”
The internet has two faces: the content we see, and what happens behind the scenes. Unfortunately for some, particularly journalists, so much of what remains hidden comes in video form. Video needed to be read like text: “Video is like a book. You want an exact moment”
To solve his problem, Mireles tapped his savings, reached out to a programming friend, paid freelancers with iPhones and started SpeakerText. “We needed a way to fit video into the web’s text calculus,” remarks Mirelese. “So we developed a program called QuoteLink: any time you copy text, it goes to an exact moment in the video.” A little over a year later, in January of 2010, they launched SpeakerText. From there it was upward and onward.
With version 1.0 on steady ground, Mireles began assembling a more permanent team: Front End Developer Tyler Kieft, a 23-year old who turned down a job at Lockheed Martin to join SpeakerText, and Chief Technology Officer Matt Swanson, 25, whom Mireles met through a mutual friend and sealed their deal over beers in the East Village. Swanson is a serial entrepreneur and former Artificial Intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
As a way of saving money, the trio lived together. Some fledgling companies would crumble under such a scenario. Mireles insists their arrangement helped SpeakerText flourish: “Living together helped the team mentality: our creativity grew exponentially.”
Over the next few months the men worked at perfecting SpeakerText and its QuoteLink technology to meet Mireles’ vision: seamlessly transcribing video into text, thus feeding the alphabet-hungry internet valuable information.
“We’ve built a radically new assembly line to create text. We break video into chunks based on voice recognition, use crowd-sourcing, add time stamps,” he explains. “It’s broken down into microtasks that allows a lot of volume in a short amount of time.” Now they just needed to get some attention.
It turns out SpeakerText didn’t need a publicist, something some start-ups see as absolutely essential. Matt just used what he had: a blog and Twitter. “I write a personal blog called the Metamorphosis that has gotten a lot of attention and that, combined with Twitter, has helped me build relationships with investors and others who have helped us network our way to journalists, potential clients and business development partners.”
More than just networking, Matt’s efforts also drew in angel investors to give the nascent company a financial boost.
Now that it has launched, Mireles and his team are marketing SpeakerText — whose direct competition are closed captioning services — as subscription program with scaled rates starting at $19.99 a month based on the number of videos and transcriptions a customer submits.
That subscription, Mireles says, works as an incredible search engine optimizer, fully indexible by Google. “We’re selling it as a video SEO ability that helps a video become viral,” Mireles says of their business plan. “It’s a premium service for small media companies and media bloggers, so it has to be affordable.”
SpeakerText comes in two flavors: a WordPress plugin, and as an API (Application Programming Interface) that requires users to add a few lines of code to accommodate video transcriptions. With those pieces in place, a subscriber uploads their video to YouTube, Vimeo, or whichever video site they prefer, and then sends SpeakerText a list of the videos they wish to have transcribed.
SpeakerText then imports the finished product, complete with SEO keywords, into a text box below your site’s video within 24 hours.
“We wrap the video in text,” says Mireles, ultimately making the video content more searchable, keeps readers on one’s site and, most importantly, helps create a stronger narrative.
“By building this text layer,” insists the former journalist, “we hope we can help people tell stories better, digest news and make money off of it.” Yes, if nothing else, SpeakerText represents a lifeline to the news industry. “I was a journalist. I saw the whole industry collapsing, but, at the same time, I saw a real opportunity for better storytelling.”
Looking forward to growing the company, Mireles relays the best piece of advice he’s received along his remarkable short journey: never give up and network.
Those may sound simple, but Mireles makes his case: “By networking, and forming relationships with people, you put yourself in a position where you can’t give up. There’s a cost of failure: you’ll let people down.”
Startups need tools to organize themselves. Here’s what SpeakerText uses behind the scenes.
Andrew Belonsky is a freelance journalist who also writes for Death and Taxes Magazine, Change.org, Huffington Post and generally around the internet. On twitter, he’s @andrewbelonsky.
Transcription is old news. I would have been happy if the plugin was completely automated.
Nonotes.com has been doing this for 2 years. They’re already stable and they have great customer service!
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