TranscribeMe: A Sister is Born

It was Startup Weekend Auckland, September 2011, when a group of individuals met around a concept. One team took the top prize and left the weekend walking on air and ready to race forward. They are the founders of crowd sourcing, transcription company, TranscribeMe. John Graves was part of this team that converts voice to text but he also has his own vision and so treads a different post Startup Weekend path.

Fast forward six months and the voice to text team are still together, grown and concept validated. TranscribeMe has been developed to Beta stage and is receiving international acclaim. John Graves has followed his own path to complete that service circle (voice-to-text/text-to-voice) as the founder and inventor of SlideSpeech. SlideSpeech converts text to voice.  Two outstanding concepts born from one amazing weekend – related in many ways and yet different. This is what innovation is all about.

The vision is clearly articulated and the potential of SlideSpeech, like TranscribeMe, is causing a major stir and seriously disrupting the voice/text industry. Investors and developers have congregated around these ideas to offer funds and other resources to enable John and TranscribeMe to fulfill their visions. A vision that maintains a close relationship with TranscribeMe. This is how the SlideSpeech founder sees it:

• Users create a slideshow in their desktop presentation software and upload it without speaker notes to SlideSpeech; the user opens this on their smart phone using the SlideSpeech app. They record slides on their smartphone.
• These bits of audio are sent along to TranscribeMe who crowd source voice-to-text.
• A specially formatted transcript is returned to the SlideSpeech server by TranscribeMe with markers for the slides.
• Users receive back transcripts that they can edit to make the computer voice say what they meant to have said, eliminating mistakes and background noise.

Sounds promising!

Auckland Startup Weekend is an incredible venue for sharing ideas, meeting mentors and creating magic. Sometimes that magic breeds more than anyone could have imagined. In this story, one great idea drew together one incredible group of talent, creating two awesome startup weekend success stories. Does it get better than that?