i just heard about this from a friend and got so excited at the potential, because this is something i've been wanting to be able to do forever. a company just made it so you can watch any youtube video with audio description. i just tried it and it works pretty good. not perfect, but much better than nothing. you just go to any youtube video and type "www.viddyscribe.com/ " in front of the URL, and it will open on their website with audio descriptions added.
my friend said that they have another app where you upload your own videos, and that works a lot better. i haven't tried so i don't know if i can vouch for that. but it's the same people who made speakaboo which i use everyday, so it is probably pretty good.
Comments
not bad, but I think I'll still pass
Overall, it's not bad for watching very short clips.
My main issue was with the time limit and stability—anything longer than about a minute would consistently cut out.
I also found the "pause and describe" narration method to be disruptive. Services like Seeing AI use the same approach, which effectively doubles the length of a short video.
I'm going to hold off on paying for this kind of service until the AI technology matures further. I'm hoping that as models like Gemini continue to improve, this feature might eventually be included as part of a broader subscription.
What about Piccy Butt?
Granted it has been a while since I ran a video through the app to get an audio description, and that was just a round or three of me playing Mortal Kombat 11 on my laptop, getting the video described, and then showing off what Piccy Bot can do, for a few sided friends.
Still, how does that do with YouTube videos these days?
will email them
i didn't know about the time limit, that's not good you can only do 1 minute without paying. i get that they need to make money but they should let you do more than 1 minute, that just feels useless for most people. i'm going to email them and tell about this.
i've used piccy bot too but it just gives you a paragraph of information instead of putting the descriptions in the video, not as exciting to me as hearing the description while i watch. i agree the pauses are jarring but i can see why the pauses are there. there's lots of videos where people talk the whole time, and there's probably no room for descriptions if they don't pause.
you can do more than one minute!
i emailed them and they replied really fast. basically you can just create a free account and then you can do videos up to 5 minutes. if you pay for a subscription you can do more than 5 minutes. that is much better than 1 minute, but it would still be great if they could increase the limit. lots of videos on youtube are at least 10 minutes because the algorithm favors longer videos. i told them that so hopefully they will consider. they said the wording on the site was not clear enough so they were going to change it, i just checked and they already updated the website.
i tried their main app too. it is really good! i took a video of my back yard and i have a moose wood carving outside, it described the carving perfectly and it even knew what breed my dog was. there are extra features you can pay for but i think for now i'll stick with free because it does a really good job.
Problems describing YouTube videos
Hello, I can’t describe any YouTube video. I take the link of videos that are up to five minutes long, place the site’s URL in front of the video address as mentioned here, the video even shows up, but when I click on load video nothing happens. What could I be doing wrong?
Omni describer
Omni describer's an app for Windows which uses the Gemini API to get video descriptions, so far it seems pretty capable, not a replacement for professional description, but better than... whatever that was.