transcripBot

Demo

Mention u/transcripBot in any post with v.redd.it format.

Inspiration

Reddit brings joy to millions in the world by allowing users to be more interconnected through whatever shared interests they may have. Users can form communities called subreddits, where members of a subreddit may share anything they find interesting with the subreddit in the form of text, website urls, pictures, or videos. However, currently Reddit's video player does not automatically transcribe video audio into text. We wanted to make Reddit more accessible to those with hearing impairments so they can enjoy (or procrastinate on) Reddit to it's fullest!

What it does

transcripBot transcribes speech in a video into text. It follow formatting conventions from r/TranscribersOfReddit

How We built it

We used Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW) to retrieve mentions to u/transcripBot and extract audio from submission posts, then used Google's Speech-to-Text API to transcribe the audio file into text. Using PRAW again, we have u/transcripBot reply the formatted transcription text to the comment thread. Our bot is hosted on a google cloud VM.

Challenges I ran into

Google's speech-to-text API has really poor documentation. Their original example code usages don't actually work anymore and we had to use the beta version of the API to get things working. Correctly formatting the transcript text was also harder than expected.