I actually just finished making a service that does something similar, but it also transforms the transcripts to make them into polished written documents with complete sentences and nice markdown formatting. It also can generate interactive multiple choice quizzes. And it supports editing of the markdown files with revision history and one click hosting.
I'm still doing the last testing of the site, but might as well share it here since it's so relevant:
The pricing is confusingly giving counts of videos of short length, rather than time per price.
The vodcasts that most need transcription are long form. After the "don't make me do math" pricing, you do have a table of minutes, up to 60, so for a typical, say, ContraPoints vodcast episode, you multiply by 3, and find out that could cost $30 to turn into the optimized transcript. (Which the creator might well pay for if they value their time, but viewers might not.)
Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to clarify the pricing table a bit better. And yes, this is targeting creators more. If it turns out that viewers are the better target market, I might pivot it a bit. And I'm considering adding a discount for longer videos.
I signed up, and it's a beautiful UI, with impeccable results for the PDF or Markdown flavors in particular. Speed was impressive on a video that had subtitles off. Bundling all formats into a zip is a stroke of genius.
Does your tool work on 3 hour vodcasts? There are quite a few long series I would far prefer to read than listen.
Yes, I'm also working on another version that is document-centric. It's a bit of a different problem. In the case of YouTube video transcripts, we are dealing with raw speech utterances. There could be run-on sentences, filler words and other speech errors, etc. Basically, it's a very far cry from a polished written document. Thus we need to really transform the underlying content to first get the optimized document, which can differ quite significantly from the raw transcript. Then we use that optimized document to generate the quizzes.
In the case of a document only workflow, we generally want to stick to what's in the document very closely, and just extract the text accurately using OCR if needed (or extract it directly in case we don't need OCR) and then reformat it into nice looking markdown-- but without changing the actual content itself, just its appearance. When we've turned the original document into nice looking markdown, we can then use this to generate the quizzes and perhaps other related outputs (e.g, Anki cards, Powerpoint-type presentation slides, etc.).
Because of that fundamental difference in approach, I decided to separate it into two different apps. But I'm planning on using much of the same UI and other backend structure. The document centric app also seems like it has a broader base of potential users (like teachers-- there are a lot of teachers out there, way more than there are YouTube content creators). I started with the YouTube app because my wife makes YouTube videos about music theory and I wanted to make something that at least she would actually want to use!
I'm still doing the last testing of the site, but might as well share it here since it's so relevant:
https://youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/
There might still be a few rough edges, so keep that in mind!