Microsoft’s new AI tool in OneDrive and SharePoint automatically transcribes the contents of video, audio, and image files, thereby making it much faster and easier to find specific topics and references made in those files.
No More Lengthy Transcribing
The growth of digital content, particularly in rich file types such as image, video, and audio files has made things particularly challenging when trying to search through them to find specific references, details, topics or quotes.
Up until now, it’s been a case of physically watching and listening, and transcribing the file into to text to get what you want.
Also, if you need to track down lost screenshots, snapshots and receipts, or if you have to categorise images by keywording them, or if you’re trying to search for images relating to a certain subject, this too has been a time-consuming challenge, up until now.
Search Through Audio or Video By What’s Said
The new AI-based automatic transcription system that’s been added to OneDrive and SharePoint means that users can now search through audio or video by what’s said in the file, and users can quickly find images by conducting searches using keywords based on the content.
How Does It Work?
According to a post on the Microsoft website by Omar Shahine, Partner Director of Program Management for OneDrive and SharePoint, AI can be used to extract the content from an audio or video file, and provide a full transcript which is shown in a viewer, which supports over 320 different file types.
Where automatic photo transcripts are concerned, native, secure AI is used to determine where photos were taken, recognize objects, and extract text in photos and images.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
With the web, email, text / comms and chat apps now being regularly used as part of businesses, and with digital files and rich format files being favoured, used / displayed, swapped / shared and stored, and with the rise of collaborative online working, this new feature could prove very useful to users of OneDrive and SharePoint.
The many benefits it could bring include saved costs and time in searching and having to physically transcribe, helping to leverage existing content and improve productivity, improving accessibility, and making make life a lot easier for anyone who regularly transcribes audio files e.g. content writers, journalists and anyone involved with archiving and categorising different media types. It’s only a matter of time until other technology will be bolted-on to features like this e.g. facial recognition.
Also, for Microsoft this is a feature that can help it to compete in the collaborative working platform market.