- Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day?
And welcome to our video on Rev.
Rev is a transcription service.
Now, transcription sounds like a fairly pedestrian pastime,
but oh my gosh, there are so many things
that you can do that content creators can do
if we have transcripts of our audio files,
and we're gonna explore some of those
through the service Rev.
So the video to follow was the video we prepared
for our product showcase,
which is a weekly live stream we do,
and if you wanna check out the entire livestream,
there will be links below.
Additionally, there are links below
for you to try out Rev yourself.
There's a $10 off coupon, which it will give you
10 minutes of free transcription services
for you to test out how Rev will work for you,
so I encourage you to click on the link below,
and try Rev out for yourself,
but for now, sit back, relax,
and enjoy our exploration of Rev.
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I am really looking forward
to showing what I've been learning about Rev with you
because the more I learn about what I can do
with transcriptions of the content that I create,
the more my eyes are opened to the different ways
to leverage the content
that we create day after day here at Dotto Tech,
and for those of you who are content creators of any form,
I think you're really going to benefit
from spending a few minutes
in getting to know the world of transcriptions better,
and this is the place to learn
about transcriptions is through Rev.
Now, what does Rev do?
It's a transcription service that takes our audio content,
podcasts, the audio from our videos on YouTube.
Anytime that we're speaking and creating content,
Rev will convert that content into text
that we can then leverage into a huge variety
of different applications.
I mean, at simplest form,
we use the transcriptions to create subtitles,
or to create closed captions for our videos,
but you could also create transcriptions
that you can share from podcasts or from YouTube videos.
You can use those transcripts to do a better job
of editing or to create other content,
to leverage into search
because neither YouTube nor Google can search audio content
as it is, but they do search the closed captioning
and transcription files, so they can more accurately
bring the people who should be discovering your content
to you if you use transcriptions.
How about if I just take you in to my account,
show you how I use Rev,
and then we can take you through the entire process,
and open your eyes to some of the different ways
that Rev works.
This is my account here,
and you can see all of the videos
that I have had transcriptions created for up to now.
When I'm ready to create a new transcription
or a new closed captioning file for one of my videos,
I place a new order that I choose the type of transcription
that I want whether it's a straight up transcription.
If it's an automated transcription,
which means, it costs less.
They use machine learning at 10 cents a minute.
It's not quite as accurate, but still pretty good.
It's really good if you're doing editing
and you're not gonna be using it for final publishing.
Closed captions, subtitles, or translation.
I'm gonna choose a closed caption file.
And then, this is very cool.
It's integrated directly with my YouTube account.
I can choose wherever I wanna upload a file from.
If it's a video or an audio file on my computer,
I can drag and drop, and upload it.
I can share a link to any website
as long it's a public video or audio file
for them to do a transcription of.
Or here's the magic.
They'll actually pull the video directly from my account.
In my case, a YouTube account,
but it will also work for Vimeo.
So watch, I click on YouTube.
I have integrated the accounts.
I've given Rev permission to view my YouTube account
and I can choose here which video I want them
to do a transcription of
and then add that to my cart,
and I can do multiple ones at a time.
Now, you need to know that your videos
have to be either unlisted or public videos.
If they're private videos,
Rev can't get access to do the transcription,
so we always upload our videos
and make them unlisted as we're doing all of our editing
and preparations, so we ask for this to be done
after we've edited our video once it's all ready.
Before we publish it, we order the transcription.
I add it to the cart as you see here,
and then this one thing that's really cool.
First of all, it times everything,
It says, okay it's a seven minute video,
it's gonna cost you $7.
And then this is the thing that surprise the heck out of me.
Automatically deliver the files back to YouTube.
Once they've completed doing the transcription,
they will then take that transcription file
and upload it to YouTube for me,
which removes a step in the production process
of me doing myself.
When I first started to use the service,
I thought that they would simply just allow me
to download the SRT file, which is the format
that YouTube wants for closed captioning,
and then I would manually upload that file
into my YouTube video myself.
It's a fairly straightforward process.
But no, they do it for me,
which probably saves me six to 10 minutes per video,
and that's something that I really appreciate.
It's one of the little subtleties,
one of the little kind of nuances
that makes Rev a real pleasure to use,
so they will automatically upload it back to your video.
So once that's done, you check out.
As soon as you've paid and you pay be either credit card
or PayPal, as soon as you pay, the order is processed,
and then within a few hours or whatever timeframe
they've promised you, you'll get an email
that the project is complete,
and you video has been uploaded,
and you can then go back into your dashboard here,
and you can see the transcription.
While it's under process, you'll see that it's in process,
so you'll actually see the file here as well,
but you won't be able to do anything with it.
Once they've finished with the transcription,
you can then go in and now we can leverage
that transcription into some other areas.
We can download it,
and when we choose to download it,
we can download it as timed text, as a transcript,
as just basic text.
There was a SRT file for uploading into YouTube
or another video player, just the way that we see here.
But what we do is we take the transcript itself
and we download that.
What happens then is we get the transcript
and I take that file, which is just a simple text file,
which is just a straight up transcription
of all of the text from the video,
and we embed that in the blog post
for search engine optimization,
so that when Google is crawling our website,
they see all of the text, they see all of the references,
and all of the keywords that are part of our video
'cause they won't be able of course see that
within the video itself.
They'll get some of the information if we write a blog post,
but here, they get all of the information,
what we've said in the video that they can search on,
and then they can deliver people to us
as people are searching if it's appropriate,
so that is a really nice way of using it.
Now, some people will use this rough cut,
the first transcription,
and they'll use it to help them decide
on editing of a video
or especially if you're doing a podcast,
to edit the podcast.
So there's lots of creative ways
to use this content if you want.
Now, before we leave here, I should show you
they've also got an editing interface right built
within the Rev browser.
If I go in and view this video,
just click on the file itself.
It launches Rev's own editor,
which allows you to view the transcript
at the same time as you're watching the video.
So if we click here, you'll see
video running.
You see the transcription happening,
closed captioning happening,
and you can can go in and you can edit this copy
if it's not accurate.
They also provide some nice extra features in here
that'll allow you to do things
like adding atmospherics, which are, it's sound effects.
You're adding text for sound effects.
But this is the one that I really like.
Replace casual words with formal.
And the example they use is an example
that actually drives me crazy.
When I first saw my transcripts,
I didn't realize how often I say gonna,
so you're gonna love this.
You're gonna like this, or I'm gonna show you right now
how to do this,
and it doesn't bother me too much when I hear it on video,
but when I read it, it makes me feel like a total rube.
What they will do is they will go in
and they will replace those casual words
with the more formal going to instead of gonna.
It just makes you look a little bit more intelligent
than you really were as you are actually
delivering the content.
I like that.
As a matter of fact, there's a variety of different places
within Rev where you can add extra value.
As you're doing your first order,
if you have multiple speakers,
giving the Rev transcriptionists the names
of the multiple people as you're going along
of the different speakers.
It allows them to accurately
not just say speaker one, speaker two,
but say Steve, Bob, Jim to properly identify the speakers.
Also, there's the ability to add a glossary of terms,
especially if you're doing medical
or if there's anything that's unique to the content
that you're presenting.
You can make sure that the terms are spelled properly
and if there's any unique words,
that they are inserted correctly, not just phonetically.
So you've got some nice additional features
as you go along.
I'm just gonna cut in here for a minute
into our previously recorded demo to remind you
that we've got a coupon in the description below
that will give you 10 minutes of free access to Rev.
They will do a 10 minute transcription for you,
so you can test out the services for yourself.
The link is below.
I encourage you to try it out.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Now, one of the things that made me pause
when I was first starting to use Rev was I always felt
that YouTube actually does a pretty good job
with their automated transcription
and so, I was wondering where the value was
with me switching over to, and paying basically, to use Rev.
So I had a chat with a product manager at Rev
with Connie Liu, and she filled me in on the difference
between YouTube's automated transcription
and the benefits that we get
from Rev's more accurate transcriptions.
- In terms of accuracy,
YouTube's captions are not on par with Rev's.
You'll find that if you use YouTube's,
often times, there would be kind of errors in it,
sometimes hilarious ones,
but still not things that you would want permanently there
on your videos.
So, YouTube is not great at picking up accents,
crosstalk, or multiple speakers.
Most automated services actually aren't,
and Rev is the best at that
both in terms of our automated services,
but obviously, our human transcription and captioning
are able to pick up a lot of those nuances that, you know,
auto-transcription and captioning would not be able to.
- And you know, after I ask that,
I thought that my accent is very neutral,
which makes it probably a lot easier
for me to do automated transcription.
I've always had really good success with things like Siri,
but I know that friends of mine who have accents
have far less success with the automated services,
so it makes total sense
that the human transcription services are better.
So the next thing that I wanted to know from Connie
is just what does the backend of Rev look like?
How do they process all of these audio files?
What sort of human resources do they have?
- Yep, so we have as of today,
probably around 40,000 freelancers.
They're always working.
So basically, anytime you submit a file,
there will be a freelancer who's readily available
to pick up your job,
and we are the largest workforce of freelancers
in the industry, so you wouldn't be able to find
any other marketplace out there
that has this type of workforce.
- Now beyond the team that Rev has doing transcriptions,
they also have technology
that will do automated transcriptions
at a far lower rate of about 10 cents a minute.
- Very much so, yes.
And the reason being is the machine transcription
is definitely cheaper.
It's 10 cents per minute as opposed to the human,
which is a $1 per minute.
So, a lot of content creators often times
for the work-in-progress transcripts
where it's not audience facing,
they would prefer to opt for the automated instead.
- Now, what Connie meant there by audience facing
is imagine you're creating a podcast,
you're recording a podcast,
and you've recorded a 45-minute podcast
that's gonna be edited down to 30 minutes.
If you are giving your editor notes
based on having to listen to that podcast,
it can be pretty challenging.
It's an awkward process.
However, if you can look at a transcript,
and start to make your cuts
and edits based on that text file,
it's far easier for you to communicate
what you want your final outcome to look like
from the text file.
Now, we spend most of our time up to now
talking what kind of traditional closed captioning,
use of transcription embedded within the video,
but hard bait subtitles over top of the video
also has increasing value these days,
especially when we consider
that we're seeing so much video content being delivered
into feeds like Instagram and Facebook
where people don't necessarily have the audio turned on,
but they need to communicate what's being said
in video without sound.
- For sure, yes.
One of the main use cases actually is for video creators
who do want to post on these social media channels
because as you mentioned, Steve,
these videos auto-play on silent.
They do not come with sound.
And actually, 85% of these videos
are actually watched on mute,
so what that means is if you don't have captions
on that video, you're basically missing out on 85%
of your potential audience,
and you're only capturing 15% of the people
who are watching it with sound,
which is definitely a lot of opportunity left on the table,
so we have a lot of video creators
who create captions for that purpose
to make sure that people who are watching videos
without sound are still able to understand the content.
- Still have two things I wanna cover.
The first is I wanna talk about translation,
about taking our content
and translating it into another language,
an opportunity, which I never really thought
that might be available to me before,
but is now available at a pretty reasonable rate.
- Yep so, in terms of adding foreign language subtitles,
it definitely helps expand the content
to international audiences
and on YouTube, in particular, it's important
because YouTube serves 88 countries in,
I think 76 languages, and in particular,
if you're a content creator in the United States,
80% of YouTube viewers actually come
from outside of the U.S., so basically,
without foreign language subtitles,
you are only capturing 20% of YouTube's audience.
So, and not to mention, even within the U.S.,
a lot of people who do speak English,
English is not their native language.
- The last thing I wanna talk about right now
is the Rev Recorder, which is,
if you take a look here on my smartphone,
they have a recording utility
that allows you to kind of almost uses a dictaphone,
you don't quite have the same audio controls,
but you can record exactly what you want to record
using your microphone, or using your smartphone,
using your headset,
and then once you've finished the recording,
watch what happens.
I'm gonna stop here, I'm gonna save it,
and when I save it, I can send it directly to Rev
for them to do the transcription on it directly.
So, this opens up a huge opportunity
for people who like to dictate letters
or maybe even authors.
- There are indeed a lot of authors who write entire books
by just using our transcription services.
They like to dictate and kind of just record the audio
because one, it allows them
to kind of do so wherever and whenever,
not just in front of a desktop,
but also, in a lot of instances, they actually speak faster
than they can type, so we have the voice recorder app
which a lot of authors use
in order to actually record entire books.
Sometimes, shorter blog posts, sometimes, shorter articles,
but definitely, entire books are cases
that we've seen as well,
and then they simply transcribe that,
and then edit it from there.
- I wanna wrap up with one last question,
which is this series,
this video series is a product showcase,
discover great products, which I think we can agree
Rev looks like a great product,
and meet the people behind them,
so I ask Connie what it was about being at Rev
that excites her.
- I think what really excites me is Rev's mission,
which is to create millions of work from home jobs
that's powered by artificial intelligence,
and I think there's still such a long way to go,
you know, as I previously mentioned,
now there's like 40,000 freelancers
who work on Rev's platform,
but that's still a far away from millions.
And so, imagine a world where millions of people
have the option to work wherever and whenever they want,
and is just super easy to find the job that they need.
That's just super exciting.
That's definitely what motivates me on a day to day.
- We'll let Connie have the last word on Rev,
which I think we can all agree looks like a terrific tool.
I like using it.
It's something that I'm happy to spend money on
and I find the value that I get
from using Rev is exceptional.
It's really, broadened my horizons
about how to leverage the content that I'm already creating.
I hope that that opens your eyes to some of the potential
of a tool like Rev.
Transcription goes way beyond just closed captioning
or subtitles for videos.
Oh, my gosh.
There are so many ways that we can use transcriptions.
My eyes were opened to many opportunities
as I prepared that video.
Once again, a reminder that this video that you just watched
was prepared for our weekly product showcase
where we take a look at great products
and introduce you to the people behind them,
so if you wanna sign up and join us
for any of our live product showcases,
I encourage you to subscribe to this channel here
at Dotto Tech to make sure that you're notified
when we do our livestream.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.
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