Integrated at the speed of thought

Here's an insight into the power (and opportunity) of recommendations from the likes of ChatGPT or Claude, especially during a coding session.

The Context

I have an old podcast feed from Mobile Industry Review comprising interviews and videos created back in the dawn of the smartphone ecosystem. There are an astonishing 300+ episodes and I'd essentially forgotten. They were published on the website and in various feeds across the years that, sadly, no longer exist. So the videos are embedded in posts on the website and don't generally work anymore. An example is that I used to publish with a website (about 15 years ago!) called blip.tv. It no longer exists. 

But I found the whole lot sitting on a forgotten Vimeo account recently. 

Some of the videos have titles and descriptions. Some of them don't. I remember why: Occasionally I would just throw up the video on to the web and then embed it – and that's where I would do the explanations. 

So I've got 40+ videos in that collection that have nothing. No title – literally 'untitled' and no description. 

I wondered if I could change that. 

So I got Claude Code to download one of them and put it through OpenAI's Whisper transcription system. Within seconds I had the transcript. I realised that it was just a stream of words though. 

I asked Claude Code how to identify speakers. 

The Recommendation

Apparently this called 'speaker diarisation' and it seems the OpenAI API doesn't support that, or so said Claude Code. Instead it suggested that if I wanted this feature, I should check out AssemblyAI. 

To be clear, I've never heard of them before this point. 

Claude Code gave me a breakdown on the company and suggested I register and check their service out. I had a quick browse around their website to establish some credibility. Then I googled and found other organisations and experts referencing them. Ok. Given this is public (if, slightly hidden for a while) information I wanted to transcribe I was content. 

Ultra Fast Activation

I quickly made an account and – conveniently – the next step after making the account was an API key. Their system literally presented that to me as step 2 of registering. I threw that into Claude Code. 

The AssemblyAI team helpfully give you $50 of credit to get started so I didn't even need to register a credit card. This is ultra smart thinking as it let me check them out and see if they were any good.

Within seconds, Claude Code had the revised transcript prepared. 

AssemblyAI was nothing short of brilliant. Did exactly what it promised. 

Now I have one video transcribed, I was able to generate a suitable title and description automatically and then edit to my specific preferences. 

I can obviously now repeat this!

The Outcome

The point of my post? Discoverability and super-streamlined onboarding. Whatever the team at AssemblyAI have been doing, they've been doing it right.  

It was the first result suggested to me by Claude Code in the middle of a coding session with it.

Nice work, Team AssemblyAI.

The Learning

• Use as many 'SEO' dark arts as you can to try and get included in recommendations from the likes of Claude Code - I imagine it's got a lot to do with independent authority from across lots of sites?
• The minute you're discovered, make sure it's easy to adopt your services
• Presenting the API key to me after I signed up – i.e. step 2 – was a genius move.
• I saw some text underneath this with words to the effect of "non techie?" and there was an explanation for them. But this journey was specifically optimised for the likes of me.
• Support super fast validation: The AssemblyAI team won my attention and direct integration into my operating stack by making sure I could get to a meaningful output (and thereby test their credibility and capability) within seconds. And I do mean literal seconds. I think I had my first transcript within less than 30 seconds of registering.