For many journalists, transcribing an interview, especially a lengthy one, can be a long and arduous process. After nearly 30 years in the journalism industry, and countless hours of transferring audio to text, one journalist believes he has finally found a solution to ease the most painful part of a reporter’s workflow.

Following a series of successful beta tests at Thomson Reuters, BBC, NPR and The Washington Post, Jeff Kofman and his team decided to formally launch Trint (trint.com), the world’s first cloud-based transcription platform.

The concept was hatched after he met a group of developers in London who had done some experimenting tethering audio and video to text.

“That’s how Trint was born,” said Kofman, who serves as CEO and co-founder of Trint. “It’s a partnership between a team of brilliant developers and a journalist who has spent thousands of hours of his life transcribing. I like to think of it as a kind of pain-killer—transcription relief.”

The way in which Trint—a concoction of the words “transcription” and “interview”—works is quick and straightforward. Simply drag and drop your audio or video files into its browser-based platform, and wait a few minutes for the file to be converted to text. Additionally, Trint glues your audio to the text on screen making it easy to search, verify and correct the transcripts.

Other notable features include the ability to highlight a block of text and view the length of your selection, a speaker box that allows you to identify who is speaking and the option to export your completed transcript as a word document to share with others.

Trint currently maintains language models for American, British and Australian English as well as Spanish, French and German. Additional languages will be added later this year.

Users have several different pricing options ranging from the “Pay As You Go” option for the casual user (25 cents per minute) to the “Supercharged” package for the professional ($120 for 10 hours of upload a month). A free trial is available for all first-time users.

“Today a single interview can be used for an online story, a broadcast or print story, a podcast, an online Q&A and highlights can be sent out on social media too. Often that’s just too much labor so a lot of it doesn’t happen,” Kofman said. “That means good content doesn’t get the exposure it could have.”

In the coming months, Kofman’s team is planning on releasing a series of tools that allow users to instantly select and caption video for social media sharing and embed searchable word-aligned audio-video transcripts that news organizations can publish on their websites.

“We want users to see Trint as much more than simply a transcription tool. This is all just the beginning,” Kofman said. “We have a whole suite of sharing and collaboration tools in our pipeline that will transform how we access, share and archive content.”

Originally published here.

We’re always happy to chat about the innovative tech we work on here at Trint, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for all media enquiries at victoria@trint.com.