What’s good in the hood, folks? I’ll tell you what. Today my guest is – Ulysse, PhD student and Founder of Scribewave.

Scribewave is an online transcription, captioning, and subtitling service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate accurate and high-quality transcripts, captions, and subtitles for audio and video files in any language.

To use Scribewave, simply upload your audio or video file and select the language you want to transcribe, caption, or subtitle it. Scribewave will then use its AI technology to generate a transcript, captions, or subtitles for your file. You can then review and edit the transcript, captions, or subtitles as needed.

Overall, Scribewave is a powerful and easy-to-use transcription, captioning, and subtitling service that can be used by individuals, businesses, and educational institutions to create accurate and high-quality transcripts, captions, and subtitles quickly and easily.

Chris: Could you tell us about your experience in the AI field and how you came to create the Scribewave?

Ulysse: Coming from a web development background, I began exploring AI models about a year ago while working on a sustainable fashion tech startup. I was struck by the vast array of practical applications in a field I had previously considered mostly theoretical. This motivated me to deepen my understanding of training and deploying machine learning models for user-friendly applications.

Chris: How has Scribewave’s AI-powered transcription and subtitling technology evolved since the company was founded?

Ulysse: Scribewave began as a side project aimed at automating the creation of lyric videos. I enjoy writing and producing unique songs but found the video-making process for social media tedious. To solve this, I developed an audio-to-video converter that instantly turned my songs into lyric videos. My friends saw the platform’s potential for academic applications, like transcribing interviews and focus groups. I added a specialized transcription editor with time-synced capabilities to the platform and rebranded it as “Scribewave.”

The core model remained the same but proved remarkably effective at transcribing both spoken words and singing in over 20 languages. Since then, the models have been refined and optimized for faster processing and better uptime, making Scribewave one of the fastest and most accurate services available. We’ve expanded our language support to include over 90 languages, continuously broadening our market reach.

Chris: What are some of the biggest challenges you faced when developing Scribewave?

Ulysse: From a technical standpoint, scaling my proof-of-concept to handle thousands of simultaneous requests was a significant challenge. It was the first time one of my projects gained such traction, and my knowledge of cloud infrastructure was rather rudimentary at the time. Persevering through these hurdles has made Scribewave not only fast and highly available, but it has also enriched my skill set.

On the business front, I quickly realized that coding prowess alone isn’t sufficient. Marketing has been a continual challenge; I’m still experimenting with various strategies to effectively promote Scribewave, aiming to offer a cost-effective way for academics, journalists and content creators to transcribe their audio and video content online.

Chris: What are some of the most innovative ways that Scribewave is being used by its customers?

Ulysse: Interestingly, some customers have been using the lyric video module to create videos for instrumental tracks, simply because they are enamored with the audio visualizers. This unexpected use case turned out to be a delightful, unintended benefit of the module.

Chris: What are some of the specific ways that Scribewave’s AI-powered transcription and subtitling technology is different from traditional transcription services?

Ulysse: Our service is exceptionally fast: a one-hour audio file can be processed in under four minutes. In contrast, many competitors require up to half an hour to transcribe a one-hour file. Additionally, we offer a substantial free tier without the need for a credit card, setting us apart from many others. We’re also among the few services that accept debit cards as a payment option.

Chris: What do you think distinguishes you from your competitors?

Ulysse: We set ourselves apart in three key areas:

Multilingual Support: Unlike most transcription services that primarily focus on English, we offer models trained on a diverse range of languages, including Spanish, Dutch, and Arabic.

Specialized Editor: Our platform features an intuitive, time-synced editor that allows users to effortlessly modify the transcript and export it in various file formats.

Multimodality: We offer unique cross-modal conversions, such as transforming audio into video through our lyric video module

Chris: What are your biggest goals for Scribewave in the next 5 years?

Ulysse: We aim to expand our user base by introducing special educational plans tailored for students and researchers, with the goal of making Scribewave the go-to academic transcription service. Additionally, we aspire to evolve into a comprehensive audio intelligence platform, equipped with robust search and summarization capabilities.

Chris: What are some of the ways that Scribewave is using multimodal innovation to improve the transcription and subtitling experience for people with disabilities?

Ulysse: Some of our clients include production studios that utilize our service to automatically generate subtitles for the visually impaired for their films and series. Our rapid, automated workflow enables the quick and cost-effective addition of multilingual subtitles, thereby enhancing the quality and availability of this accessibility feature.

Chris: Thanks for being with me, any last words? Where can our readers follow you?

Ulysse: Thank you for the interview, I appreciate the opportunity to showcase our service to the world. Readers can follow us by creating an account at Scribewave. Also, feel free to follow our LinkedIn page.