Transcribe Videos And Make Them Searchable With Koemei

Wouldn't it be great to be able to search videos for what people are actually saying instead of relying on tags or descriptions? Koemei (pronounced "co-may") aims to do just that through their cloud-based speech recognition software that rapidly transcribes video and audio, even if people have accents or more than one person is speaking. But the startup is also targeting the large quantities of media content from videoconferencing, webcasting, and classroom lectures being produced in business, government, and educational institutions, and by indexing the transcripts, video libraries will become easily searchable. According to the company, it currently takes about an hour for its system to automatically transcribe one hour of media at a cost of about $0.09 a minute, much cheaper than manual transcription, though user pricing for the service has not been announced. Building on 8 years of research, the startup comes out of the Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, and is in the process of raising $1.5 million is a Series A round on top of its Angel funding since its 2010 launch.