This little gem has just come to my attention - SpeakerText. It  is a new free web application designed  for video publishers that turns a video’s text transcript into a an interactive search and navigation tool.

SpeakerText Beta replaces the standard YouTube video player and adds an clickable transcript alongside the video, letting you search and navigate within videos using the transcript. As you click on lines of  lyrics, you jump to that point in the video. This is fun with short videos, but could be a very useful tool when viewing longer videos, such as a speech or a concert video.

SpeakerText also supports some unique approaches to embedding videos.When bloggers copy text from the transcript, SpeakerText pastes a QuoteLink to the user’s clipboard that hyperlinks back to the corresponding moment in the source video. SpeakerText also lets you create and share custom clips of longer videos by highlighting the transcript text that corresponds to the portion of the video they want to share.

Matt Mireles founder states “I created SpeakerText because it was something I needed when I was working as a journalist,” says  “As anyone who has ever tried to find something inside of a video will tell you, video is a pain to work with. It’s opaque, it’s linear, and searching through it by clicking on the slider bar makes you want to shoot yourself. Our goal is to eliminate all this pain and make video as easy to use as text.”

“We have a long way to go and this is just the beginning,” says Mireles, “But believe you me, the kind of functionality that we’ve built into SpeakerText will be standard fare across the web within five years. We’re at the start of a revolution in how people use and interact with video, and we knew that if we didn’t do this, someone else would.”

SpeakerText is an easy-to-use tool that lets you find, read and share what people are saying inside of videos. The service is available now as a free beta. See :-  http://speakertext.com/browse.php