How to monitor (get a transcript of) television

October 5, 2010 4:59 PM

What would be the easiest way to record television and get it automatically transcribed? (some of the content would be in spanish)

My boss at work wants me to set up a monitoring system for television content. We would have three or four cable channels playing simultaneously and hooked to computers. The computers would then store the content or at least a transcript w/a timestamp, and there would be a way to detect when certain keywords are said.

What software/hardware solutions are out there that would do this efficiently? Some of the content would be in english, but the majority would be in spanish.

My budget isn't very clear right now, but I'm more interested in the quality of the transcription than the price.

posted by Omon Ra to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Assuming the programs have Closed Captioning, use something like CCExtractor (google it), extract the captions to a text file, and search away to your heart's content.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:43 PM on October 5, 2010

Some do and some don't. Thanks for the suggestion for CCExtractor tho.
posted by Omon Ra at 5:51 PM on October 5, 2010

There are services that do this for you already. Do you really want to reinvent the wheel?
posted by b1tr0t at 7:05 PM on October 5, 2010

What channels do you have in mind? LiveDash.com monitors 27 national networks and three local stations, creating full searchable transcripts with timestamps. And if you set up an account, you can get it to send you email alerts when a certain keyword is recorded on a certain channel, either in real time or in hourly/daily/etc. reports.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:58 PM on October 5, 2010

The problem Rahomi is that the channels are mostly in Mexico. There are services that do that kind of work over here, but they are so expensive we're looking at several options.
posted by Omon Ra at 11:10 PM on October 5, 2010