Simon Says Assemble is Text-Based Video Editing
Normally, I’m trying to figure out the words to say. But I think I should let the transcription say it for me. This is Simon Says – it’s a transcription app that uses AI to not only transcribe, but also helps you figure out how to edit videos by looking at what was said.
Assemble puts the text next to timecodes. You can choose to remove a certain part of text/video, or create a quick social meme.
But I spoke too much. Let’s let the software do the work:
Jeffrey Powers: continuing coverage, see twenty, twenty one virtual virtual being me, you hear us? I’ve got here us Shmeer. And the company called Simon says you’re called Schmeer, but you’re not called Simon, right?
Shamir Allibhai: Exactly. Yeah. You know, I get that mixed up a lot incessantly on chat where people are like,”Hi, Simon.” No Schama, but Simon’s fine.
Jeffrey Powers: Now tell people your role at Simon Says and a little bit about what Simon says, says or is.
Shamir Allibhai: Yeah, absolutely it is. Shamir Allibhai , CEO and founder of Simon says AI, where we’re using speech recognition to transcribe and translate audio video, typically at the beginning of post-production, where you have your dailies or rushing your interviews that you want to find the meaningful parts of, or at the end of an edit where you want to subtitle caption that edit for distribution.
Jeffrey Powers: And last month we released it, Simon says Assemble, which is now text based video editing so you can find the sound bytes in your transcript and then drag and drop in order then to create the foundation of your story. It’s collaborative, it’s web based, getting a lot of kudos for it. So I’m really excited with where it’s headed.
Jeffrey Powers: So how that how Assemble works is but we’ll take this video we’re making we’re making a video right here, I would put that into Simon says it would transcribe it and then I would see like a storyboard type situation. Is that how that works?
Shamir Allibhai: So, yeah, and so on. When you load up, assemble, you’ve already transcribed your video. And so what you see is in the source monitor. And below is the transcript for the original video that you imported. And then you just go in editing a Microsoft Word or Google Docs, just highlight the sentences
Shamir Allibhai: the key words and the beauty and the kind of technology behind it is what speech recognition is doing is it’s matching each word to a time reference point in the video.
Shamir Allibhai: And so when you highlight the sentence, Simon knows the end point and I’ll point for that sentence. And so you highlight that sentence and you highlighted and then on the timeline side, now you have these sub-clips these sentences, and you can just drag order sentences around to create the foundation of your story.
Shamir Allibhai: And a video is dynamically created again, sentences nose in and out points for each sentence. You give an example, one video, but imagine you’re done 10 interviews. And so you want to cut from interviewee A interviewee B, you can do that.
Shamir Allibhai: On the timeline side, the video is dynamically created. So now you’re watching in real time this this rough cut being formed and easy, as is some word, or Google Docs is simply highlighting text copying and pasting and ordering around.
Jeffrey Powers: So so there is some actual video editing that you can do in this.
Shamir Allibhai: It’s mostly text based. But yes, the editing would happen because you’re dragging and dropping the sound bytes to the order in which you desire.
Jeffrey Powers: That little bit you said right there will become its own sound bite if we use the software. So if I if I want to do anything like reframing or anything like that, I would then have to move that over to a editing program that would do a video reference.
Shamir Allibhai: Exactly. The kind of key thing that we’re trying to solve here is we started with just transcribing and what users really wanted was not just the transcripts, but they wanted to find the sound bytes in their transcript and then they wanted to order the sound bytes to create the foundation of the story.
Shamir Allibhai: And Simon says, really solving that particular pain point of getting everybody, your entire team, your client on the same page as to what the story is, the foundation, the main sound bytes in the correct desired order that create that story.
Shamir Allibhai: And once you aligned on that story and so it’s always like your teammates, they can say, hey, we don’t like the sound byte is a bit sensitive. We find an alternative sound byte. They can look it up themselves. And so what we’re getting rid of is this entire feedback loop.
Shamir Allibhai: There is no export out a rough cut. Get some notes back and implement those notes. Do another expert out. It’s all half live like a Google doc.
Shamir Allibhai: Once the team goes and finds the alternative sound byte and runs a line now on that rough cut, now you’ve solved that like really painful part. And now you can go get export in sentences, assemble exports out and XML for Adobe Premiere pro final cut pro AVID media composer Imposer DaVinci Resolver.
Shamir Allibhai: Now you can go and bring that story to life. You can find your Barole shots, you can add text in credits, grade in color. And so that’s where you would do the polishing is.
Jeffrey Powers: Yeah. And what I can also think of is you could sit there and go, OK, I’m doing this part, but somebody could be reading through there and go, oh wait, no, this should not be in this video. And instead of. Using that clip, actually completely removing that clip.
Shamir Allibhai: Absolutely, And so what we’re seeing is that there are so many other teammates in the production process who would love to be involved in the story editing. But because video editing applications are typically very technical and technical barrier to entry, what science is assemble is really, let’s say an assistant or associate producer quickly skim through the transcript of an interview, find the sound bites that they recall when doing the interview and already started creating the foundation of your story.
Shamir Allibhai: And so the video editor now doesn’t have to waste time scrubbing through audio, picking out soundbites that they may think of, but really the rest of the team may not align on. The video editor can now go do the most creative part, which is bringing that story to life, picking the shots, figuring out the pacing, the timing, the cadence adding in music cutting to that.
Shamir Allibhai: And so this tedious, almost monotonous process of finding sound bites, finding almost the points that each sound and ordering them in a way which tells a story, that part is now no longer this technical, complicated process. And every member of the team is empowered to do that because it’s so simple. It’s as easy as editing in a Google doc.
Jeffrey Powers: Is there any thought about actually setting this up as a plug in for like a resolve or a final cut?
Shamir Allibhai: So that’s the thing. We’ve already actually built the extensions and the plug ins for all the major MLE’s. And it was really at the initial stages where we said, hey, we want to be part of the workflow. So if a user has all their dailies or interviews in resolve or FCP or premiere, they can just drop it into Simon Says extension. And so it’s created a proxy. It uploads it transcribes it, it adds markers to those clips. So that already exists.
Shamir Allibhai: Now, what we’re doing is we’re saying, hey, and that was the kind of challenge that we’re solving, is that this transcript markers were really, really helpful on the clips, being able to add captions on an edit, really, really helpful. But what users really want to do with the transcript was share that across teams help teammates who wanted to find sound bytes and create the story everyone to align on the same page. And so a Assemble really is the next level of that. But yes, we already have those extensions.
Jeffrey Powers: That’s awesome. Yeah, because if I was if I had this in all the videos, I could then create a small sound and do it just like somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk does for some of his videos. He has his team just take out those little soundbytes, puts them up on Facebook, puts them up on Instagram and all that other that other good stuff.
Shamir Allibhai: And often times that’s not a very technical – it becomes technical because of the tools it needed. But if you can reduce the technical know how needed to be able to just like empower anyone to create a clip and be able to share it on Twitter or Facebook, I think that’s pretty liberating. And so that’s what one of the things that we want to solve here was anyone who wanted to create video should be able to do it as simply as typing in a word, doc.
Shamir Allibhai: And I think that’s the kind of beauty of this, is that you can just like skim the text, highlight the soundbite hit export if you are exporting into your MLE. It’s just magical how it just seamlessly recreates and reconnects your original source clips on the timeline to the rough cut that you created. And Simon says assemble.
Jeffrey Powers: OK, I’m sold. I’d like to I want to try this. How do we how do we probably do is what’s the pricing? What’s what’s what’s all the details on that?
Shamir Allibhai: Absolutely. So the website is Simon says dot AI. We have pay as you go plans starter and a pro plan. And the plans include free credit for transcription and translation in assemble.
Shamir Allibhai: It’s free to use. We don’t have any there’s no cost to use. Hyman says assemble, just transcribe and translate your audio video in, Simon says, and you can automatically bring it into Simon says assemble and start cutting from it. Explored collaborating with your teammates. There’s no restrictions.
Jeffrey Powers: Is Assemble in beta right now.
Shamir Allibhai: No Assemble and live.
Shamir Allibhai: OK, perfect. And you said Simon says dot…
Shamir Allibhai: is Simon says dot AI if you’re using a if you’re using FCP for example you can go to the Mac App Store and search, Simon says. And we have an extension on Adobe Exchange, which is Adobe’s version of the App Store.
Shamir Allibhai: You can search, Simon says, and download the extended for be premier, pro and. A resolve, also similar process with the Mac App Store, the Simon says Mac app also doubles as a resolve extension.
Jeffrey Powers: OK, perfect. Well, Simon says -Shamir, thank you very much. And yes, I did say Shamir. I was debating whether I was going to joke with the Simon versus Shamir thing. But thank you very much for your time.
Shamir Allibhai: Thank you. You too.