At first I was thinking that youtube's recent sub title mod must of been a bit of a hit to their idea, but then I saw the functionality of quoting and sharing hyper linked quotes.
That's quite a cool feature and could be handy for stopping 'mis quoting' / 'quoting out of context' being used in many media's.
I helped recruit for a 20-person startup at my alma mater in the fall, and found:
- if your brand isn't immediately recognizable as a tech startup, signs like "Seeking CS / Math majors" are tacky but help immensely with capturing the interest of students who are browsing and want to know they won't be sucked into talking to a company totally outside their interests
- we spent much more time pitching our startup and answering questions about "what we do" than I imagine the average recruiter at a larger company has to do
- because the conversation almost always starts with them asking about us, if you're interested, you have to remember to turn the conversation on them to find out more, instead of just being left with a resume
- (more general) knowing which classes are good / hard / produce interesting projects helps a lot in evaluating what a particular candidate has done, and whether it matches with your company's needs.
Is there a technical reason preventing the big guys (youtube/yahoo /vimeo etc.) from developing this kind of thing? I always thought running voice recognition on user submitted videos would require massive infrastructure. How are you guys planning to solve that? Congrats & best of luck with the rest!
We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition. It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost.
Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it with speech recognition.
It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how people have traditionally approached this problem.
Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled.
Offtopic: I'd like to see an API for SpeakerText where I can point to my own video asset on an Amazon S3 bucket along with an API endpoint that I specify and you would send me a POST with the transcribed text whenever it's finished processing. I'd purchase that service tomorrow.
This product makes all of the videos out there indexable by its entire audio content. You could start crawling, processing videos and indexing them right?
Is that in your roadmap? To become one of the best video search tools out there?
Hi, thanks so much! There are so many areas we want to expand into, for now our goal is to provide video publishers with the ability to SEO their videos via transcripts and quotelinks. All that publishers have to do is put one line of javascript and one line of server side code on their webpages and now they can get their videos put on google's radar. Video search would also be interesting long term.
tl;dr: SpeakerText is their startup, the SpeakerCave is their house or apartment, and no mention is made of it being cave-shaped or made of speakers (bummer).
>“Your team hasn’t know each other long enough,” he told us––or something like that. But they’d be happy to talk to us again, later, in the fall, assuming we hadn’t self-destructed already.
Oh man had that been me, I would properly double my efforts to get the startup to be the next facebook, just to mail PG and tell him he missed the boat...
Even though I was also rejected by YC without an interview - Not "ready" or "prepared", and no co-founder, were the likely reasons, I can accept being rejected.
I still believe that PG's opinion counts for a lot. I doubt many seed programs have partners that loose sleep over missed opportunities.
I think it's easy for a lot of people to forget that VC and seed-stage investors aren't in business to help you; they're in business primarily to help themselves, in the form of sexy portfolio companies, talent acquisitions, and investments that pay back later.
The relationship is at best symbiotic, so as long as they're healthy, I'm certain that they don't lose any sleep at all over the "opportunities" that they pass up.
