Simon Says Launches AI Transcription Extension for Adobe Premiere Pro

Simon Says, an AI transcription and video assembly platform for video professionals, just released a workflow extension panel for Adobe Premiere Pro.

While Simon Says has supported web-based transcription for several years, the news here is the Premiere extension. This means you can transcribe interviews and translate foreign-language recordings — in 100 languages — and receive transcript markers that attach back to clips. Caption edits for accessibility and subtitle sequences for international distribution in minutes.

With Adobe announcing that Premiere will soon support speech-to-text transcription natively, I asked Shamir Allibhai, CEO of Simon Says, why they created this extension. I learned this extension is part of a larger vision. “The focus is with Simon Says Assemble and allowing people to tell their visual stories much easier/faster and by lowering the technical barriers to edit (i.e. text-based editing is so much easier). It is getting affection by editors in that it saves them 50%-75% of the time to create a rough cut and their teammates/clients can jump in and everyone can quickly align, then export back to their NLE to polish, title, and color.”

Other benefits of Simon Says, according to Shamir, include:

• The Simon Says extension for Adobe assists as it allows editors to seamlessly bring in clips to Simon Says (i.e. integrated workflow) and we preserve the metadata from Premiere to Simon Says and back to Premiere.
• The Simon Says extension can do captioning like Adobe’s beta feature but we support virtually the entire world’s spoken language which is dozens and dozens more languages than Adobe.
• Simon Says also uses AI at the outset of post to transcribe all those clips to make sense out of, again, speech in 100 languages.
• Simon Says also translates, useful when doing foreign language interviews and subtitling a video for international audiences. All from within the non-linear editor.
• Couple the extension with Assemble, Simon Says’ text-based video editor for assembling a rough cut from the soundbites and Premiere Pro users can save upwards of 50% of the time it typically takes to create a rough cut when using Assemble, getting them to the creative work faster.

Additional features include:

• Transcribe dailies and interviews and caption sequences in minutes and in 100 languages with speech recognition and speaker identification
• Add industry-jargon and names to increase transcript accuracy with Custom Dictionaries
• Collaborate with teammates: invite them to mark the interview transcript or view an edit
• Use the audio-transcript interface to add speaker names, make edits, and annotate
• Go into Assemble mode and cut the paper edit by dragging and dropping the soundbite transcript text into the desired order to form the spine of your film; then finish it in Premiere where the sequence magically reconnects with the source media
• Translate and subtitle foreign language projects in over 100 languages
• Add video subtitles that are CEA 608 and 708 compliant or adjust the number of characters per line to your own needs.

Once installed, the Simon Says extension lives as a panel inside Adobe Premiere Pro. Users select the media or sequence they want to import and Adobe Media Encoder will launch to transcode it. It is then uploaded to the project in the cloud and transcribed in minutes; results are displayed in the extension where creatives can edit and export it.

Download the Simon Says Extension for Adobe Premiere Pro in the Adobe Exchange marketplace to get started transcribing, translating and captioning content in Premiere.

New users get 15 minutes free credit and Simon Says has Pay As You Go and subscription plans.

Learn more on the Simon Says website: https://www.simonsays.ai