30 ON THE FRONT LINE OF


Jeff Kofman certainly never expected to become a technology entrepreneur. As an Emmy award-winning network television news foreign correspondent and war correspondent with ABC, CBS and CBC News, he spent more than three decades reporting on some of the biggest stories of our time, including the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill and the Chile mine rescue. However, his exasperation with some of the


more time-consuming aspects of his work eventually took him down a somewhat different path. Like many journalists, Kofman had lived with the frustration of manual transcription his entire career. Indeed, he couldn’t believe he was still manually transcribing interviews, speeches and news conferences in the 21st century. Following a chance encounter at MozFest, an open source coding conference in London, he teamed up with a group of developers to explore the use of artifi cial intelligence AI techniues such as automated speech recognition A and natural language processing P for audio and video transcription.


By the end of 2014, Kofman had left his job at ABC News and started to build Trint. “It took a couple of years to get it to market. We had to raise the money and moving from news reporting to building a startup meant I had so much to learn,” he says. Now, the New York Times is Trint’s lead investor, while others include the Associated Press. Theyre two of our biggest customers as well,” Kofman says. While Trint counts many of the biggest media organisations in the world as its customers, its user base goes far beyond media and includes marketing agencies, tech platforms, governments and universities. With its military-grade security and servers in the EU and the US, Trint has positioned itself to serve customers on both sides of the Atlantic. Kofman is only half joking when he says he invented this product for himself. “It solves a pain point that I lived and the part of my job that I liked least, and I just saw an opportunity to leverage AI and software to do the heavy lifting of content creation and liberate us to do the interesting stuff.”


“I call myself the accidental entrepreneur,” he adds. “Nobody is more surprised than me that I’m sitting here as a tech guy, an inventor, a CEO.”


STORYTELLING INNOVATION Self-styled ‘accidental entrepreneur’ Jeff Kofman explains how Trint grew out of the desire to free journalists like himself from mundane tasks such as transcribing interviews, allowing them to focus on the more creative elements of their jobs


ofa o hi ecod  reportig o the oerthro of uaar adaffi durig the ra prig of 


LIGHT-BULB MOMENT Trint is a productivity platform that uses AI to convert speech to text, then gives users the tools to fi nd what they need in their audio and video content. A and P are applied to decipher the sounds that make up human speech. It matches those sounds to the corresponding word in its dictionary and displays those words in the Trint Editor. The video or audio fi le is then made searchable, editable and shareable.


“I call myself the accidental


entrepreneur. Nobody is more surprised than me that I’m sitting here as a tech guy, an inventor, a CEO”


Trint can turnaround live transcripts with a delay of just seconds. It works in 32 languages and translates into 50 languages. Live transcription is compatible with common streaming formats, including both push TP and pull TP, TP, , Icecast, P. Kofman says the vision was always to build


more than just an automated transcription tool, noting that the basic transcription of conversations, whether audio or video, “is rapidly being commoditised”. “Where it gets valuable is the ability to build content in one seamless workfl ow to actually take those moments that matter and say, ‘I like this quote or soundbite, let me put it here. Let me go to that interview and fi nd another one. And then let me write something in between’,” he says.


Building a collaborative platform is key. “For most people today, the process of creating content involves bringing others in,” he says. The next step is to enable content creation on a live basis. “We are in the process of releasing a product on mobile that will allow me to do an interview where I’m sitting, and people, anywhere they have access to the internet, will be able to listen and ultimately watch that interview, come in with transcripts live and take moments, seconds after they’ve been said and say, ‘Oh, she just made news. Let’s use that, verify that the automated transcript is correct, if not fi x it uickly. And bang, its out on Twitter.


ALWAYS A JOURNALIST Kofman says journalists need products like Trint in part because of the extent to which the nature of news output and journalism has changed. “When I began in television in the 1980s, in


Toronto, I did a TV story, and I went home, that was it. Nobody in journalism is doing that today. ow youre putting it out on four or fi ve different social media feeds, you’re getting it online from the fi eld, you might be doing an audio report, you’ll be doing a debrief, you might do something for a podcast. That same piece of content is now being pulled in so many different directions at the same time. And so people need tools to do that,” he says.


IBC attendees will be able to see a demonstration of Trint on the Content Everywhere stage at 16:00-16:30 on Sunday 11 September.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96