I've been interested in podcasts as a consumer for years, waiting for the more of radio's "share of ear" (is that a term?) to be replaced by podcasts. We're starting to see that happen as the industry is expected to double this year and the adoption of voice-based hardware such as Echo's and Google Home will accelerate this in addition to open new opportunities for makers to create audio-based experiences. But today the tools are super rudimentary, creating an opportunity to create the pick axes for our future in voice and audio technology. /end rant Descript looks super useful, a tool that was incubated inside of Andrew and team's location-aware audio platform, Detour.

@andrewmason unrelated from the product itself: you had an amazing approach to progressive equity for your last projects. did you do the same approach for descript? and what was your experience with it?

1/ What differentiates this from jotengine.com 2/ How do you moat this business against competition? 3/ How many podcasters out there actually make money that would use this? (technically you can scrape all new podcasts and get their contact info, that seems simple enough, so you can certainly email all of them to sell this to them.....)

Hello! Andrew (CEO) here. After almost three years in the making, it's a real thrill to launch Descript. If you work with voice audio in any form, Descript is probably what you've been dreaming of. Yes, we do transcription (both automatic and human-powered), but that's just the starting point - Descript's superpower is what happens after the transcript - you can edit audio by editing text. You can download Descript for free - sign up with this link and you'll get 100 free minutes of transcription: https://app.descript.com/r/HyCCc.... More on Descript's backstory: https://medium.com/descript/intr... And a post about automatic transcription accuracy: https://medium.com/descript/comp... Thanks, happy as always to answer questions.

please, world, only use this for good

Congrats @andrewmason and Detour/Descript team. Audio needs a lot more TLC and we @adorilabs are big fans of what you guys are working on. Was this based on Steve Rubin's PhD work under Dr. Maneesh Agrawala called Audio Stories (http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/a...). If so, it is awesome to see academic research commercialized this way.

Anyone here knows about a tool that can automatically "separate - music from the voice content in Audio"?

Literally sitting down to transcribe something today and.... mac only. Damnit! Plans for a pc version?

This looks great. The things I liked about it are: 1. The transcription of the audio file seemed pretty accurate, which is not always the case with other transcription tools that I tried. 2. The price point seems right at $10/month 3. The UI/UX is great and provides an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The things that seem lacking are support of multiple tracks. For my podcast, I capture the audio from each person on separate tracks, so I will have to merge them outside of Descript before being able to use Descript. Would be great if there was some functionality to merge tracks within Descript.

this looks incredible! any plans to make the transcriptions usable as captions (i.e. with time codes in the transcription file)? a bunch of youtubers would use this instead of rev.com

I am producing a podcast for Slate on a small budget, with a 2 person team. I would not have taken this on without access to Descript. It has made a stressful chore, an enjoyable endeavour - it frees your inner artist by removing monotony.

Pros:

Truly a bicycle for the mind. Let's one person do what required a team to do before.

Cons:

Can't think of any

Just signed up! Now just gotta test for its accuracy. If you want free 100 minutes, you can use my referral link - https://app.descript.com/r/SyoVo...

52 upvotes but no review yet? Anyone used Descript yet and had success? Would be useful to hear if this tool can outperform services like Rev or Trint. Interested to hear some reviews after it’s been put through its paces. I’ll do the same once I’ve had a chance to take it for a spin.

Maybe this could use something like Lyrebird.ai to create voice transcriptions of added text! Also, would be cool if it could identify voices and tag pieces of text with the speaker! (Just spitballin' here! Great work so far!)

Yeah wow! I was looking for something just like this recently. Audio transcription with export to .srt all in the same app. Keep up the great work!

I'd love to see this work great, but there have been so many teams trying to solve this, and no one is there yet. (I just did a round of transcription with Trint and had to do a ton of cleanup after). I'll wait on early reviews before I check it out.

Pretty cool! If you want to get 100 free minutes to play around with it: https://app.descript.com/r/SJ15u...

Cool project

Great work guys. I have one question. If you add a word to the text, what happens? Because in the video demo, you are only removing repeated words.

I’m a huge fan of Andrew’s and Descript. Descript makes it was easier to edit audio content than traditional audio editors. It’s particularly better for folks making podcasts, or audio guides. I’ll also call out the app’s polish, which makes it even more of a delight to use.