Transcript Desk, video research
Transcript Desk turns video into research material: a link becomes a timestamped transcript, a summary and a table of claims worth checking. It runs entirely on your own computer — nothing goes to the cloud, no subscription. The code is public on GitHub.
See the full portfolioAn hour of video for a minute of information
More and more primary research lives in video and podcasts: interviews, talks, hour-long discussions you need three claims from. You scrub, take notes by hand, lose the timestamp, and the transcript — if it exists — is locked inside the platform holding the video. The tools that do this in the cloud want a subscription and get to see all your research material.
Link in, working material out
We built a local desk: you give it a link, and the app pulls the audio, transcribes it with timestamps, and produces a summary plus a claims table — what was said, when, and what deserves checking. Everything runs on your own Mac, so the research material never leaves the machine. We built it for our own research, then published it on GitHub.
Color palette
A dark desk with warm off-white text and almost no color — coral shows up only for errors. The transcript is the star, not the interface.
A monospace-led desk — timestamps, transcript and the claims table align to the character.
System sans for controls and labels, monospace for everything that is working material.
Monospace for material, sans for controls.
From research to launch
- Input
- Video or podcast link
- Transcript
- Timestamps on every line
- Research
- Summary
- Claims table
From link to working material
Fact, opinion, speculation
Any note can get an on-demand research pack: the exact quotes from the transcript, split into fact, opinion, and speculation, plus verification queries ready to search. Every claim keeps the second it was said, so checking starts at the source.
The reading list
Books get their own section: add a title and the author, description, and tags fill themselves in. From a note you've already captured, whether a BookTok video, a tweet, or an article, the app pulls every book it mentions and keeps the source's own framing in the first tag. The list exports as Markdown.
Results
The next case study could be yours.
Tell us what you want to build, and we'll turn your idea into the next project in our portfolio.