My first MVP! YouTube Scribe - Get Free Transcripts For Any Video

by Cedric

Want to read any YouTube video? Now you can with ytscribe.com

But before that, I just want to say that I'm finally shipping something in the software space! I'm happy and it's because of all the creators here.

I'm english major turned marketer turned part-time coder.

And I recently learned Django, APIs, and chrome extensions. And one of the first things I was inspired by was podcastnotes who have great write-ups of popular podcasts.

And I thought, instead of notes, why not just get the full transcript. That would be so much better. And a lot of these podcasts are hosted on YouTube so I figured I would just grab the srt file and stitch it together.

But if you actually get the .srt of a YouTube video, it's pretty much garbage. There's no punctuation. No spacing, it's impossible to ready.

So I built YouTube Scribe so that it grabs that srt file, fixes all the little mistakes, punctuates the text and time codes so you can jump to any part of the video.

Uses:
Scan through long podcasts as your own personal essays
Get tutorials, video essays, all as time-coded text. Basically you can go through YouTube a lot faster now!

So I would love to get some feedback. Install the chrome extension and try it out on any video.

Think there's a market here? Let me know in the comments below.

Cedric

posted to

Ideas and Validation

on May 29, 2020

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I don't think there is a market because you can simply click on the 3 dots under a youtube video, and if it has subtitles, there will be a button called "Open Transcript". If the video doesnt have subtitles by itself, your site doesnt even work and just tells me to install the chrome extension (although I already have it installed!)

I tested it out on a youtube video and noticed the differences:
- You have much less timestamps in your transcript, which can be useful, but I think having the detailed timestamps in the "Open Transcript" window are better.
- The green progress bar on your site isn't actually progress through the video, but through the entire site (including the recommendations at the bottom)
- Your timestamps are usually about half a second off, meaning the first few words of the transcription aren't actually visible
- You added punctuation which would be cool if it actually worked. Example:
  "I thought it might be.
  Cool to make a video...."
Now, what can you do better:
- Improve the punctuation algorithm (If you just grabbed one off of github, this might be a bit harder than if you made it yourself.)
- Add an option to get more detailed timestamps
- Make the timestamps 1 second shorter so that nothing is cut off
- Remove the "YouTube" trademark from your title, I don't know if Google allows others to use their trademark (This is just a recommendation, I am not a trademark expert)
- Improve your favicon so that it doesn't contain any text that becomes unreadable (remember: its only 32x32 pixels on many devices!)
- Add an option to transcribe a video directly through the link so that people who don't use Chrome (I use Firefox) can use the website without opening a browser that they don't even use.
Even if you improved it with all of the things I mentioned, it would still me more effort than just using the already implemented feature from Youtube. Therefore, I don't think many people would prefer this to the native Youtube version.
Weiiswurst

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6 years ago
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  Thanks this is helpful. Yea I think potentially as a tool for YouTubers to create blog posts, or for other YouTubers to steal script ideas is where it could be useful. But I think it's a bit of a stretch. Going to do a bit more outreach to see how people feel. I added the URL form on the homepage as well.
  
  Sparky
  
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  6 years ago
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