I only spent a few minutes walking the NAB show floor today but a trip by the plugin pavilion and I saw an old manual typewriter in the Digital Anarchy booth. A closer look reveled an upcoming extension panel for Adobe Premiere Pro CC called Transcriptive. This tool should go into beta soon and it looks to add a nice little addition to the PPro toolset. It was a few versions ago that Adobe removed the old built-in transcription tool that wasn’t very accurate. Transcriptive will use cloud services (the user will get to choose which service to use with their varying costs) to do the transcription and the Transcriptive tool will be what integrates the transcription back into Premiere.

These modern cloud services are much more accurate than what Adobe had built into the old versions of Premiere. Digital Anarchy is claiming 96% accuracy with good quality audio. If all goes according to plan then buyers of the $249 Transcriptive tool will be able to choose between Speechmatics ($.07 / minute) and IBM’s Watson (which currently offers 1000 minutes free per month). Once the video is transcribed the fun begins in the PPro Transcriptive panel.

There will be a number of things that will aid in the often tedious process of working with and cleaning up transcriptions. Things like speaker identification, timecode support, punctuation identification, text search and full Premiere Pro marker support means a lot of options. I love the idea of being able to read the transcription in a panel and then jump right to that part of the clip via the transcription.

No word on a ship date yet but beta testing will begin soon. Keep an eye on the Digital Anarchy website as more information become available.