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This week, I published an eBook about the Blockchain.
Blockchain Billions: How this technology will make money and change the world
If you prefer to listen to the interviews from this eBook, you can subscribe to the Blockchain Billions podcast series to hear a new episode every Monday.
You can also find this podcast on iTunes.
The eBook is now available on Amazon.
Disclosure: Links to other sites may be affiliate links that generate us a small commission at no extra cost to you.
While collaborating with a co-author, I started a new audio interview series talking with over 30 professionals working in the space of Blockchain from all over the world. A new interview will be released every week from December 2016 through July 2017. There will also be an eBook available with all the interview transcripts.
You can find this audio interview series on http://bcbpodcast.com
Disclosure: Links to other sites may be affiliate links that generate us a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Over the past few years, I have found that converting speech to text has a lot of value.
Speech recorded or otherwise is not very searchable without a transcript.
In 2013, I ran a successful Kickstarter project to transcribe over 100 audio podcasts into the written word and create an ebook out of these transcriptions.
In 2016, I created three other podcast series. As an experiment, I wanted to see which was more valuable. Audio alone or audio with transcripts. Guess which one was viewed more? Hint: the series with transcripts was viewed/listened to a lot more.
People value the transcripts. Enough to make an eBook out of them.
I have used a variety of tools for transcripts.
I tried Dragon Speak Naturally by Nuance a while back which is trained to your voice, but I kept forgetting I had it available to me. I am not the person speaking in my audio recording especially, book projects and podcasts which are mostly interviews. Now there is similar technology on my laptop (when connected to the web).
If you prefer to have your voice transcribed, most Apple, Chrome, and Windows-based computers now have the option of activating speech-to-text (aka dictation) where you turn on this feature (with a hotkey) and start talking as you watch your words appear on your page. If you can talk, your computer can write for you quite literally. Helps for brainstorming and writing any stream of consciousness. Some tools work better than others. Just don’t forget to edit the text later since we speak differently than we read.
When it comes to transcribing audio recordings, I used one online vendor for a successful Kickstarter project. This same vendor did a great job back then. However, after while they began to deliver slower (1 week+), less consistently and results were not as accurate as I had previously seen. This did not just happen once or twice. This caused me to look elsewhere within the free market for similar transcription services.
No transcripts are 100% accurate due to nuances in language, pronunciation, accents and even poor audio recordings, so you need to check the transcripts received against the audio you sent. I do and so should you whether you use machine transcription or human transcription. Neither is 100% accurate.
In 2016, I started to use Rev and now get transcripts for my audio recordings in less than 12 hours.
I also found a few contractors from Upwork who do transcription well, but are much slower (1 day) which is okay when it is not time-sensitive, but you have to hunt for them because they get a lot of work from around the world.
In 2018, I started using Temi to get transcripts from my audio recordings within a few minutes. Yes, that’s right…transcripts in minutes, not hours nor days. Faster and less expensive. Game changer! A 16-minute audio file gets transcribed in less than half that time thanks to machine-generated transcription which seems to improve every time I use it. Temi costs a fraction of the price of human-generated transcription. Accuracy is very close to human-generated transcription, however, I review every transcript I get back from humans or machines since there are specific words and contexts that most would miss if I did not.
UPDATE:
In March 2020, I started using Otter.ai to get transcripts of my audio recordings for podcasts and new book projects within a few minutes of getting audio. The tiered plans makes it easy to for teams to collaborate if you have external contractors reviewing the text against the audio for you. I hire a contractor on Upwork to do this overnight for a few transcripts at a time which me saves the hours of doing it myself.
Now back to creating more eBooks based on audio interviews recorded and transcribed.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, including: (updated in 2021)
Your ears are more available than your eyes. You can use headphones or earbuds.
Unless you need dead air (silence), why not consume some audio content?
If you are waiting (commuting, traveling, in line) somewhere, why not learn something new instead of vegetating in place?
Do you like good content? Pick a topic. There is a podcast about it.
Do you like good content that is free to download and consume? How much of your content is free vs. paid for? All podcasts worth listening to are free.
You can find all of the podcasts I work on here
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Since no one else has done this to my knowledge, I thought it would be interesting to launch a series of audio interviews with professionals talking about Rights Management. It is called Rights.tech
Questions like “What is copyright?” and “How to register copyright?” has already been done by others. I am not interested in repeating it because that broken record has little success of audience engagement. The size of that issue is mentioned in several interviews. I was more interested in sharing the perspectives of professionals on the status of this market.
I reached out to the top professionals in the field of Rights Management globally about what they thought about the market.
Here are the 5 questions I asked everyone interviewed:
A few declined to be interviewed, but most welcomed it because this is an underserved market (IP and content licensing not so sexy) and it is complicated. I like niche markets for this reason.
Starting in May 2o16, Rights.tech will have new interviews throughout the summer with standards bodies, vendors, licensees, licensors, consultants, create creators and associations with interests in Rights Management.
I reached out to a few conferences about this, but since I am leveling the playing field and I am one of the few consultants not in the pocket of any vendors (yes, I remain vendor-neutral), do not expect to me to be headlining anywhere on the conference circuit. That is what consultants call ‘partnering’ or ‘preferred’ solution providers. I don’t prefer nor partner with any vendors because I am a vendor-neutral consultant.
How do I remain vendor-neutral and interview Rights Management vendors at the same time?
No sales pitches allowed in the interviews. No money exchanged either way. Release all the vendor interviews on the same day. Everyone is interviewed based on who they are and what they do, however not who they work for. No favoritism. I bet most people did not know there were this many Rights Management vendors on the market today. There are others, but they declined to be interviewed.
Same with the standards bodies. There are too many of them. Not all were keen to be interviewed. Sadly, some were just too disorganized to be interviewed.
To listen to this series about Rights Management, visit Rights.tech
Henrik de Gyor 