In this week’s SlatorPod, Happy Scribe CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling.

André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of transcription and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina.

The CEO shares how their product development has evolved, from initially deploying the Google Speech API to connecting to various off-the-shelf systems to, now, building their own custom models. He talks about how being a bootstrapped company forces them to focus on producing results with limited resources.

André touches on the different customized features that allow users to create a vocabulary list, build their own dictionary, and adjust the number of characters per line for subtitling projects.

He gives his take on what’s driving the popularity of subtitles in short-form content and how subtitling differs between TikTok and long-form entertainment.

The CEO talks about the positives and negatives of Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source ASR model, and its impact on the AI space. The pod rounds off with Happy Scribe’s roadmap for 2023, including some interesting changes to pricing.