AP to automate video, audio transcription with Trint

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The Associated Press and Trint have announced that they will work together to automate AP's video and audio transcription process, streamlining the news agency's workflow.

AP video journalists across the globe will use Trint to transcribe recorded interviews and events for use in the video and text news report. The transcriptions are reviewed by journalists for accuracy before the content is published.

Launched in 2016, Trint uses artificial intelligence to quickly generate searchable transcriptions of audio and video that can promptly be verified and timed.

"Rolling out Trint across our video teams allows our journalists to work smarter and helps us deliver content faster. Our producers check the work rather than spend hours creating it, which frees up time to focus on the most urgent stories that need our attention," said Derl McCrudden, AP deputy managing editor for digital and visual journalism. "We're also able to assess the news value of some content much faster, and that means we're getting the most important sound bites out to customers more quickly."

In a pilot project, AP journalists in production centers in New York, Washington and London, as well as several bureaus including Mexico City, Berlin and Moscow, used Trint to transcribe audio and video from recorded interviews rather than doing so manually. The pilot found that video producers were spending more than 45 minutes per day on manual transcription. Using Trint resulted in a significant reduction in transcription time.

"We are thrilled to work with AP, the world's most trusted news organization, in solving one of the most tedious, time-consuming and expensive parts of the reporting process," said Trint Founder and CEO Jeff Kofman, an Emmy-winning broadcast journalist and war correspondent (ABC, CBS and CBC News). "Our goal is to create a seamless and smarter workflow so journalists at AP and other news organizations can spend less time on laborious stenography and more time creating content. AP has shown us that Trint can increase productivity and allow their teams to focus on doing what they do best – reporting and publishing high-quality journalism."

By merging two pieces of software – a text editor and audio/video player – into one, Trint glues the source audio and video to the text on the screen, making it possible to search recorded content by keywords, verify a machine-generated transcript in seconds, polish it in minutes and export it in multiple formats. With reasonably clean audio, accuracy rates can be better than 95 percent.

AP has integrated the Trint Enterprise application programming interface into its content management system, allowing easy onboarding via single sign-on. Trint Enterprise includes a customizable administrative dashboard, secure data encryption, an Adobe Premiere plugin, and the recently launched Vocab Builder, which lets users create a custom list of brand names, technical terms and other uncommon words to make automated transcription even more accurate. Trint is also available on iOS mobile.

Trint will work closely with AP to incorporate feedback and update features to further enhance the product and streamline the transcribing, editing and publishing process.

The Associated Press, Trint, AP
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