This week 3Play Media (http://3playmedia.com/), a Somerville, MA company, gained $450,000 in seed money from angel investors to perfect its audio transcription technology. In “conjunction with” this funding, the lead investor, Tole Khesnin, joined 3Play as its director of marketing, taking the company’s employee count to five. Khesnin now works alongside the company’s four founders: Josh Miller, Chris Johnson, Chris Antunes, and Jeremy Barron--all graduates of the MIT Sloan School of Management.
According to 3Play’s blog (http://blog.3playmedia.com/) “Tole is a serial entrepreneur and fits well with the 3Play team.” Tole co-founded MK Engineering, which was sold to GE Energy, founded Digital Pickle, which was sold to Paran Holdings, and co-founded Level 9 Technology, which he still plays a part in. To further increase 3Play’s knowledge arsenal, they are seeking a developer and quality assurance manager.
While only three years old, 3Play’s patent-pending technology, which “parses audio to produce a text transcript,” has managed to gain tremendous attention. But using a computer to generate text from audio is only Step 1 in their 3-step conversion process. Step 2 involves trained employees verifying the computer’s output and making corrections as required. 3Play feels this is a necessary step, considering that the complexities of English will make a perfect computer-generated audio-to-text conversion unlikely. Finally, Step 3 is the “human quality review.” In this step, another set of employees verify the work of the human editors. This 3-step process, complete with built-in redundancies, ensures the best-quality output.
One interesting feature the 3Play technology includes is the “Keyword Density Meter.” When someone searches an audio file for a particular word, the meter displays how many times the word appears in the file by showing green horizontal bars across a black rectangle, which represents the audio file in its entirety. Naturally, the more green bars shown in the display, the more times your search term appears in the audio file.
Another tool, the “Live Transcript with Word-to-Word Linking,” ties in directly with the Keyword Density Meter. When someone clicks one of the green markers in the meter, the tool takes them directly to that point in the corresponding transcript. Conversely, if someone clicks a word in the written transcript, the corresponding media file will load to that point.
“Our technology is built to handle anything from a one-off project to large media libraries,” 3Play’s site attests. The company suggests using its technology to convert media archives into written transcripts. Once completed, the transcripts offer an alternate way to receive information, as compared to viewing the original media, and add the above-mentioned search capabilities.
Using the technology to produce lower-cost closed captioning for DVDs and television shows is another application of 3Play’s technology. The company explains that their computerized process can often under-price having the job completed off-shore. Pricing for 3Play’s service is not immediately available on their website. Instead, interested parties are encouraged to contact 3Play “for a more personalized service.”
It will be interesting to see how 3Play Media uses its seed money to perfect its technology and rise to new levels of success.
For more information visit: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/08/daily4-3Play-Media-finds-funding-from-angel-investors.html
