My company makes products targeted at the entertainment industry. Our cloud workflow platform https://www.kollaborate.tv is used by customers to share work-in-progress content with their colleagues and clients and get feedback.
Currently we are running DeepSpeech as a preview/beta using the public models. We have tried to be open with customers about the situations it works well with and set expectations correctly. In the meantime, we are working on training a model that better matches the kinds of files our customers upload. (Because it is a preview it is not currently listed as a feature on the homepage but it’s there.)
Our customers’ use-cases tend to fall into two categories: transcribing finished content (caption files / text transcripts are often required when submitting content to distributors) and transcribing raw camera footage (dailies) to make the content easily searchable. We are planning to build additional features on top of transcription like version diffs.
There were two main barriers to using Google/AWS for transcription:
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Per-minute billing. Many customers upload hundreds of hours of content per month and we would have to implement usage limitations to stop costs spiraling out of control. We think transcription of video content is useful enough that it should be easily accessible and we therefore don’t plan to charge for transcription, unlike all of our competitors.
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It’s not self-contained. We offer customers the ability to self-host our service if they prefer, so we needed a solution that does not require a connection to an outside service. Also, as much of the content we host is pre-release movies/TV shows, privacy is important and the fewer third-parties we share with, the better.
DeepSpeech obviously solves both of these problems, as well as letting self-hosted customers create their own models to better match their content if they wish to do so. As a small company, the connection with Common Voice was extremely important to us as well.
If you have any questions or want me to run experiments, I am happy to do so, although I cannot of course provide or reveal customer information.