https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription

A tool for creating a repository of transcribed videos
https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription

Last synced: 12 days ago
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A tool for creating a repository of transcribed videos

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription
• Owner: simonw
• License: apache-2.0
• Created: 2022-09-25T14:28:23.000Z (about 2 years ago)
• Default Branch: main
• Last Pushed: 2022-11-06T15:03:59.000Z (about 2 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-10-18T07:53:43.297Z (25 days ago)
• Language: Python
• Homepage:
• Size: 23.4 KB
• Stars: 176
• Watchers: 5
• Forks: 25
• Open Issues: 52
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

Awesome Lists containing this project

• awesome-replicate - action-transcription - A tool for creating a repository of transcribed videos using GitHub Actions. (Built with Replicate)

README

        
# Action Transcription

## Team Members

Simon Willison - [@simonw](https://twitter.com/simonw) - [simonwillison.net](https://simonwillison.net/)

For more on this project: [A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions](https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/30/action-transcription/)

## Tool Description

Action Transcription supports archiving and searching the transcripts of videos from multiple different video hosting platforms.

It runs on GitHub to take advantage of the free GitHub Actions code running mechanism - but importantly it does not require any use any tools aside from the user's browser, even to setup new instances of the tool.

If a video has captions, this tool can be used to retrieve and store those captions.

If a video does not have captions, the tool can extract the audio from the video and run it through [Whisper](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/) - a new, state-of-the-art speech-to-text tool from OpenAI.

## Demo

A demo version of this tool can be found at [simonw/action-transcription-demo](https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription-demo).

- [Example issue with a VK video transcribed to English using Whisper](https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription-demo/issues/3)

- [Example issue that extracted YouTube auto-generated English captions](https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription-demo/issues/4)

## Installation

This GitHub repository acts as a "template repository" - you can create your own copy of the repository [using this form](https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription/generate).

These can be created public or private - public repos get an additional feature and are free to run, while private repos have additional cost.

If you wish to use the "Whisper" integration you will need to create an account on [Replicate](https://replicate.com/), then copy the API token from that account and create a new GitHub Actions secret in your repository called `REPLICATE_API_TOKEN`. Transcribing videos costs money - usually around $0.20 per minute of audio.

## Usage

Usage of the tool is through filing GitHub Issues.

Issues must include the URL to the video you want to transcribe in the issue body.

You can tag the issue with "captions" to extract captions from the video hosting provider (which is free), or "whisper" to transcribe the audio using Whisper (which costs money).

Note that "whisper" transcriptions only work on shorter videos: up to five minutes should be OK, but longer than that is likely to fail with a timeout error.

In public repos, issue templates are provided which help further guide the user through the process. Here's a demo:

![Animated demo. Click Issues, then New Issue, then select Get Started on the Capture captions menu option. Paste in a URL and click Submit new issue.](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9599/192150032-43b4eb68-aa39-449f-b932-f55a95c4611c.gif)

The results of the operation will be posted in a comment on the issue, and will also be written to the GitHub repository for permanent storage.

## Additional Information

The pattern I am most excited about here is the way this shows that GitHub Issues can be used to create a hopefully not-too-intimidating interface for users, which can trigger real code to be run for free by the GitHub Actions platform.

My next step with this project will be to add a custom search engine that can be used to search the transcripts of the videos. I intend to build this using [Datasette Lite](https://lite.datasette.io/).

Original development took place in the issues in the [action-transcription-prototype](https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription-prototype) repository.