Creating content has become increasingly important for businesses of all kinds, and this is especially so with the ever-growing need for more. Consumers want more than just a product description or an About Us section on your website: They want to engage and feel like they are part of something. That means you and your company are going to have to deliver. For instance, you might have a podcast or video series that you've created to help customers understand how a product works. Once you've created those video and/or audio files, you upload them to your site and share them with social media.

Speech-to-text platform company Trint is pleased to announce two new members have joined its leadership team. Odhrán McConnell is the third person to join Trint's C suite and the new Chief Technology Officer. Odhrán spent nine years at The Guardian, bringing a detailed understanding of the intersection between global media companies and state-of-the-art technology. At Trint he will focus on growing the team and developing key processes to ensure Trint's continued excellence in engineering. The new VP of Product is Graham Paterson.

Trint, the London-based transcription startup founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. The round includes follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, with participation from TechNexus, and The Associated Press. It brings total funding for Trint to $7.8 million since the company's founding in December 2014. Original backers include Google Digital News Innovation Fund and the Knight Enterprise Fund. Counting some of the world's largest media organizations as customers -- including The Associated Press, Vice News, The Washington Post and Der Spiegel -- Trint uses machine learning and speech-to-text technology to automate transcribing, which is a significant pain-point for journalists and other content producers, such as video makers.

An unprecedented voice-transcription technology can tell you not only what's being said, but who is saying it. The web app, named Trint, can listen to an audio recording or a video of two or more speakers (or just one) engaged in natural speech, then provide a written transcript of what was said. Unlike Siri or Google Talk, Trint is designed to transcribe long blocks of text. While news organizations have invested heavily in video content, the ability to optimize those clips for search engines remains elusive. Trint's technology is still nascent, but it could eventually give new life to vast swaths of non-text-based media on the internet, like videos and podcasts, by making them readable to both humans and search engines.

A new voice-transcription technology can tell you not only what's being said, but who is saying it. The software, named Trint, can listen to an audio recording or a video of two or more speakers engaged in a natural conversation, then provide a written transcript of what each person said. While news organizations have invested heavily in video content, the ability to optimize those clips for search engines remains elusive. Trint's technology is still nascent, but it could eventually give new life to vast swaths of non-text-based media on the internet, like videos and podcasts, by making them readable to both humans and search engines. People could read podcasts they lack the time or ability to listen to.

I have far more interviews recorded than I ever want to transcribe. I speak with people for a living, and record almost all my calls and conversations. There are few ways to tackle this problem, and I've tried most of them: transcribing everything myself (the best method, but only if you can block out a few days), using expensive transcription services, utilizing cheap speech-to-text AI developer tools from Google and IBM, jotting down roughly when each important topic is being talked about corresponding to the recording (my current method), and even just trying to keep interviews more concise (it's like herding cats). Trint wants to end my pain--and yours. Upload an audio or video file, wait a minute or two for it to process, and Trint will spit out a rough transcription in its online text editor.

Transcription is the bane of my existence. Yes, it is fun to be a journalist, yes it is fun to travel around the country talking to diverse and interesting people, yes it is fun to weave those people into broader stories about the world at large. But there's a middle step in there in which I come home with reams of audio interviews that I've recorded that I have to type up. And that part is not fun. For my job, I travel somewhere every month and write a handful of stories from that place, which means dozens of dozens of interviews of people who go into my stories.