What is Hyperaudio?

Hyperaudio links text to specific moments in a piece of video or audio. We make online video as easy to consume, share, and remix as text. The backbone for this is time-coded transcriptions: lists of words that were spoken in a video, where we know the exact moment that each word was said.

As an organization we support the Hyperaudio ecosystem. This means that we:

• Build tools which make it easy and cost-effective for anybody to generate a Hyperaudio transcript.
• Create interfaces that use those transcripts so that our users can edit their videos, create remixes, and tell new stories without a learning curve.
• Design experiences that make videos more interactive and easier to consume.

Who is working on it?

Hyperaudio as an organization has three founders (Mark Boas, Daniel Schultz, and Matteo Spinelli), two core developers (Laurian Gridinoc and Mark Panaghiston), and an entire community of amazing people who are excited to help by giving us feedback, trying things, and adding their content to the Hyperaudio ecosystem.

Who is using it?

We are working every day to find new partnerships with organizations that would benefit from remixable, sharable video and audio content. So far we have Hyperaudio projects at various stages with Al Jazeera, WNYC, and organizations based in the City of Chattanooga.

Where did the idea come from?

We first heard the term Hyperaudio from Henrik Moltke in 2010, he was exploring the potential for deep-linked audio with Mozilla at the time. Independently Mark had already started to play with the idea of synching text and audio word for word for the first Mozilla Festival Science Fair. At the same time, Dan was working with a scrappy transcription startup called SpeakerText, which used crowd workers to generate high quality, time coded transcripts.

The idea for the Hyperaudio Pad came from a very strange place: Mark's head. He wrote a reasonably framed proposal and shared it with the world, but the challenges and potential for this new way of creating content wouldn't leave him alone. Eventually the vision for a Hyperaudio eco-system began to crystalize. After getting together with Henrik and producing a few Hyperaudio demos for WNYC and Danish Radio, Mark decided to use the Knight-Mozilla Open News Fellowship as a way to understand and communicate the potential for Hyperaudio in the civic journalism space.

How are you funded?

We are powered by good will and generous innovation grants, but mostly the latter. The Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation have both generously provided support and mentorship to help us pursue our vision for the web through the Knight News Challenge, Mozilla Ignite, and Mozilla WebFWD.

Why are you a non profit?

The short story is that we feel that Hyperaudio, as a communication technology, should be as fundamental and free as text. The long story can be seen in this blog post.