Here’s something you won’t find on YouTube.  In addition to delivering generally kick-ass content, the videos on TED Talks have a very cool yet relatively obscure feature called  “interactive transcripts”.  If you’re not explicitly looking for it, chances are you’d never notice it.  Out of the countless videos I’ve watched on TED Talks, the first time I realized it was there was while specifically researching video captioning and transcription.

The link to an interactive transcript for a video is near the upper right corner of the right pane, next to the “About This Talk” heading.  Click on the link to get the full transcription of the video.  Now here’s the cool part – when you mouse over a transcript, blocks of text will highlight, and when you click the highlighted chunk of text, the video will jump to that point in the playback.  Interactive transcripts are like granular, contextual fast forward and rewind functions.

The challenge with interactive transcripts is, of course, the video must first be transcribed.  At the moment, since the majority of current online video content isn’t transcribed, it makes it impossible for such a useful feature to be applied universally, particularly to user-submitted content.  I’m hopeful that as automated transcription technology improves, this will no longer be the case.  Transcribed video means searchable video, and searchable video means traffic, and traffic means revenue.  So yeah, I’m confident someone at Google is on top of the automated transcription effort.

As interactive transcripts evolve, which I’m sure they will, one feature I’d personally like to see would be the ability to generate video “shorts” based on text selection.  A user could simply select a chunk of text and be presented with an option to “Generate Clip”; they’d then have a custom video delivering just that bit of content they want to view or share.  TED web team, any takers?

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