[braindead_in]

I'm a solo founder at Scribie.com. My first venture was a embedded startup which failed and we closed it down in 2008. I decided to go it solo and released a free Skype recording app called CallGraph. It was based on some of the work I had done in my failed startup. The idea was follow the Freemium model and make money off paid services. One of the services was audio transcription and that took off. In that process I discovered transcription was a big pain and decided to develop a system which takes out as much pain as possible out of it and works reliably. The result is Scribie.com.

I've been living off Scribie for the past two years and it's been fun. It pays my bills and I've learnt a hell lot--didn't know anything about web development when I started--and I consider it a success. There's a lot to do still and I hope I'll be able to grow it into a big business some day.

[nphrk]

Very nice idea! I have one technical question - do you also use some speech-to-text software, or is it 100% human labor? I believe the utilization of such software (even if it gives crude results) can be of great use to a service like yours.

[braindead_in]

Right now it's all done manually. I experimented with CMU Sphinx II when I started but results were poor. The main problem was actually the recording quality, eg. background noises, people talking over each other etc. I plan to revisit it once again and try. Maybe things have improved.

[dylanpyle]

half the price of SpeakerText and 3 times the speed? sounds awesome, I'll definitely be keeping this one in mind :)