Hey Product Hunt
Since we first announced Cassette last year (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...), we've been testing the product internally, with help from many of you in the Product Hunt community.
Today, we're releasing Cassette 1.0 for iOS on the App Store.
Cassette is the best way for designers to record & share user interviews. With almost no overhead, you can record, transcribe, and bookmark key moments in user interviews β and share it all with your team.
The app was designed by designers from Stanford d.school and UCLA Cognitive Science in collaboration with David Kelley (cofounder of IDEO and d.school). The team has worked together in the past to build Funder (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...).
We are passionate about helping people become more creative. Cassette is designed with a lot of clever scaffolding to help rookie designers become better at their craft. It's also a powerful tool that lets expert designers focus on interviewing and not have to worry about notetaking.
We hope that this allows designers to get out of the building more often and talk to real users instead of having to worry about scheduling with a notetaker.
You can try Cassette transcription for free on your first conversation (up to 30 minutes).
Can't wait to hear your thoughts,
Angad
PS you can tweet us at @CassetteTech or email me angad@lemonade.io
@preetangad This is *exactly* the tool I've been searching for to streamline my podcast production workflow at Heavybit. I write down interesting quotes, production issues, curse words, etc. while recording shows live to speed up the post process. I've used pen and paper, iPads, iPhones with external keyboard, laptops etc. to catalog this information w/ rough timecode.
None of these are perfect though - they're either too loud and come through the mics, too slow and imperfect, or require an additional step of copying everything into google docs.
Being able to simply add a bookmark that's time stamped and that optionally includes a transcript is going to save so much time pulling quotes and selecting edits, while also bringing hosts closer to the process.
Having a transcript finished at time of recording will also save time and money on the back end where I transcribe our shows. I'm curious if you can provide or re-format the raw transcripts in other formats than txt, more specifically in .ttml?
@sebfeed When we first launched, we had a pay as you go model where you paid a flat rate for each minute you transcribed. After talking to 100s of users, we decided to switch to 3 monthly subscription plans. This allowed us to make transcription 3x cheaper than before, and now up to 30x cheaper than manual transcription services.
@tedcarstensen Wow thanks a lot for those kind words. As a designer myself I saw the pain point and also noticed that many designers are still using a combination of paper, physical audio recorders, manual transcription and designated notetakers. While you can use Cassette in addition to any other tool, we think you'll quickly be relying completely on Cassette. We designed it to work completely handsfree but also gave a bunch of neat features for power users like yourself.
For now, we only export the transcripts in plain text. I wasn't familiar with .ttml but we'll take a look at it and try to add it. However, we'll soon be releasing a web-dashboard that will let you review all your recordings, transcriptions and notes on a desktop. We think you won't want to export files out of Cassette at that point since it will let you do search across all your content and jump to different parts of the audio in a flash.
I'd love to hear what other ideas you have as a power user for making the product even better.
Wow, looks beautiful and really useful. In your beta testing, have you seen people use Cassette for something other than designer user interviews? This seems like it could be used much more broadly for taking meeting notes, journalism, podcasting, etc...
@kleneway Yeah we've heard from tons of people including journalists, podcasters, executives and salespeople. As designers ourselves, we think the pain point in user interviews is the strongest, but we of course want people to use the product in as many different ways as possible. We'll soon be adding even more features to help people in other roles use Cassette as part of their existing workflows.
@preetangad@kleneway I was thinking the exact same. I totally understand laser focus on target customer. Though, one option very close to the target customer is qualitative moderators in the market research industry. They spend tons of time spend sifting through audio files and transcription costs are a big part of their costs. Same idea as UX/UI/Design reviews, but just applied to different categories and biz objectives. The Cassette design is also clean and clear - not at all intimidating. You're definitely onto something.
@rrhoover Dang! We would've been happy to send you a testflight build. Do try it on your next interview/important conversation and let us know what you think.
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@rrhoover same here, although not college students, was interviewing practitioners and this would have been handy
Great product! Thanks!
I can't use the premium version though, as our interviews are mainly conducted in language other than English. Would love to see multiple languages transcription.
@preetangad Polish would be nice. However, I'm aware that it's a niche language and the cost of supporting it might be too high. Do you use your own word transription algorithm or a third-party solution?
@ptomulik Yeah Polish is definitely niche but we plan to launch dozens of languages in the next few months, so you never know. Could you try the Polish transcription on this link and tell me how good the quality is? https://cloud.google.com/speech/
We aren't using Google's transcription services but we could use them to quickly add niche languages like Polish, if you think it's accurate enough.
Beautifully executed app. I love the color coded bookmarks. I can also see a lot of use for this app by people outside the design community as well, such as Journalists!
I was lucky enough to be one of the beta testers for Cassette. After using so many other recording tools for user interviews and running into trouble (e.g., recordings stop after a certain time, clips were hard to export for review, etc.), Cassette has been a breath of fresh air. Angad and the team really understand what we as designers need in a simple, yet powerful, recording tool.
I may increase the amount of user interviews I conduct just because of Cassette!
@themikehaynes Thank you for the kind words, Mike! I'm the designer π Be sure to let us know if we can help you with anything as you try out the app!
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