Speaker 1: Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? 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. We're going to explore some of those through the service Rev. The video to follow was a video we prepared for our product showcase, which is a weekly live stream we do and if you want to check out the entire live stream, there will be links below. Additionally, there are links below for you to try out Rev yourself. There's a $10 off coupon which 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. I am really looking forward to sharing 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 open to the different ways to leverage the content that we create day after day here at DottoTech 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 and 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 can also create transcripts 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 into 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. Then 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 $0.10 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 going to be using it for final publishing. Closed caption, subtitles or translation, I'm going to choose a closed caption file and then this is very cool. It's integrated directly with my YouTube account. I can choose wherever I want to upload a file from. If it's a video or an audio file on my computer, I can drag and drop it and upload it. I can share a link to any website as long as 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 note 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 preparation. 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 this is what is really cool. First of all, it times everything and says, okay, it's a seven-minute video, it's going to cost you $7 and then this is the thing that surprised 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 ten 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 paid and you pay by either credit card or PayPal, as soon as you paid, the order is processed and then within a few hours or whatever time frame they've promised you, you'll get an email that the project is complete and your 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 time text, as a transcript, as just basic text or as an SRT file for uploading into YouTube or another video player, just the way that we see here. 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 because they won't be able to 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 are 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, we'll see the video running. You can see the transcription happening, the closed captioning happening. You can go in and you can edit this copy if it's not accurate. They also provide some nice extra features in here that allow you to do things like adding atmospherics which are sound effects, adding text for sound effects. But this is the one that I really like, Replace Casual Words with Formal. 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 going to love this. You're going to like this. I'm going to show you right now how to do this. 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 were actually delivering the content. I like that. As a matter of fact, there are 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 transcriptionist 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 going to 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. One of the things that made me pause when I was first starting to use Rev was I've 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 and paying basically to use Rev. So I had a chat with the 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.

Speaker 2: In terms of accuracy, YouTube's captions are not on par with Rev's. You'll find that if you use YouTube's, oftentimes there would be kind of errors in it, sometimes hilarious ones, but still not things that you would want permanently there on your video. 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 automated services, but obviously our human transcription and captioning are able to pick up a lot of those nuances that auto-transcription and captioning would not be able to.

Speaker 1: And you know, after I asked that, I thought that my accent is very neutral, which makes it probably a lot easier for me to do transcription, 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 back end of Rev look like? How do they process all of these audio files? What sort of human resources do they have?

Speaker 2: Yep, so we have, as of today, probably around 40,000 freelancers that are always working. So basically any time 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.

Speaker 1: 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 $0.10 a minute.

Speaker 2: Very much so, yes, and the reason being is the machine transcription is definitely cheaper. It's $0.10 per minute as opposed to the human, which is $1 per minute. So a lot of content creators oftentimes for the work-in-progress transcripts where it's not audience-facing, they would prefer to opt for the automated instead.

Speaker 1: Now what Connie meant there by audience-facing is imagine you're creating a podcast or you're recording a podcast and you've recorded a 45-minute podcast that's going to 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. We spent most of our time up to now talking about kind of traditional closed captioning, use of transcription embedded within a video, but hard-baked 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.

Speaker 2: 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 autoplay on silent. They do not come with sound, and actually 85% of these videos are actually watched on mute. 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. 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.

Speaker 1: I still have two things I want to cover. The first is I want to 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.

Speaker 2: In terms of adding foreign language subtitles, it definitely helps expand the content to international audiences. On YouTube in particular, it's important because YouTube serves 88 countries in, I think, 76 languages. In particular, if you're a content creator in the United States, 80% of YouTube viewers actually come from outside of the US. Similarly, without foreign language subtitles, you are only capturing 20% of YouTube's audience. Not to mention even within the US, a lot of people who do speak English, English is not their native language.

Speaker 1: The last thing I want to 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 use it as 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 finish the recording, watch what happens. I'm going to stop here, I'm going to 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.

Speaker 2: 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 with it 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.

Speaker 1: I want to wrap up with one last question, which is 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 asked Connie what it was about being at Rev that excites her.

Speaker 2: 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. As I previously mentioned, now there's like 40,000 freelancers who work on Rev's platform, but that's so far away from millions. And to imagine a world where millions of people have the option to work wherever and whenever they want, and it's 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.

Speaker 1: 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 opened 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. If you'd like to join us for any of our live product showcases, I encourage you to subscribe to this channel here at DottoTech to make sure that you're notified when we do our live stream. Until next time, I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.