Speech Recognition

So the day hasn't arrived when the computer will transcribe all of your footage for you, but some new tools are coming out that use speech recognition to help line up text with video.

Caption Sync uses speech recognition to turn a transcript and audio into a caption data and/or subtitle data. You upload the text and an audio file to their website, and they turn it around in minutes. It's up to you insert the caption file onto tape or add it as subtitles to a DVD. They also support lots of web formats, like Flash, streaming, MPEG4.

Avid's Media Composer, which can be bought software-only for $5K, has a new tool with speech recognition. It's called Script Sync. You feed in a script or a transcript. For scripts, if marks out which takes cover which parts of the script. With a transcript, you can click on a line and Avid will open the clip at that line in the viewer. Pretty nifty for doc folks with long interviews. Here's a good description on Script Sync in action on The Editblog.