[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the content advantage a talk show about content for continent professionals i'm scott abel and with me today is my co-host megan gohooly hey scott how you doing happy new year i'm great thanks for joining us and happy new year back to you i hope you had a great holiday break thank you thank you i did and today we're going to talk about video now we all know that when it comes to customer experience video can be an amazing boost for our customers but we also know that producing and maintaining managing that video can be really problematic and cost prohibitive and so just when you think about the frequency of content updates localization translation the need to really keep it up to date and fresh is really really hard to do at scale and so today we've invited mark hellinger who is the chief marketing officer at videate talk to us about how technology is being used to overcome some of these hurdles that we have with making and managing videos and um just really talk about how ai comes into play so welcome to the content advantage show mark happy new year to you mark thanks for having us very good so just to get get started mark can you tell us a little bit about your yourself and how you sort of came to be connected with the subject for today yeah thanks i uh i live in san diego california and um as you said i'm with a company called vide8 and i've been around the technical communications and customer education space for about the last 15 years and so i've had some uh direct experience with uh trying to figure out how to reuse content you know repurpose content for different purposes and uh i got uh got involved with vide8 about uh 18 months ago when we started the company and we decided to go try and solve a problem that had never been solved before which is how do you use artificial intelligence and automation to try and make videos at scale so uh it's been an interesting journey we're a young company but um you know we're we're kind of excited about solving a problem that uh you know we're first to market at here so and mark we're excited about that too but before we continue the interview let's start by uh telling our audience members a few things especially people who are new to the bright talk platform or the content wrangler webinar series first today's show is being recorded you can use the same url that you're using to watch the live show right now to return later to watch a recording on demand we can't see or hear you so we don't have access to your camera or your microphone so you don't have to worry about that you can ask a question at any time by using the ask a question tab located underneath your webinar viewing panel it allows you to click on a little button pop open an editor and type in a question for us those questions are queued up for me in the background we cannot answer you back in a text but i'll know that your question is submitted and i'll try to take as many of them with our guest as possible and as time allows also there's some additional content available that you can access in the attachments and links section of your webinar viewing panel there's some content from our sponsor as well as content about about the today's presenter and the topic that we're going to be talking about uh on the way out the door we'll ask you to give us a rating of one to five stars this is a rating of the quality of the content of today's show and what you thought about it there's also a little field in which you can type your comment and why you gave us the rating that you did or to share some feedback of some other type and we'd hope that you do that if you feel inclined to do so also today's show is brought to you by zoom in software uh we'll learn a little bit more about them and there's some content about them in the attachments and links section for right now so let's take it away megan why don't you uh drive this show toward its completion and we'll start right here with mark great excellent excellent so uh scott you and the content wrangler did some research on video and you found of the people that you surveyed uh since 2017 11 of those surveyed said they created video documentation now last year it had jumped up to 50 that's a huge jump in video production that's awesome so with half of all of the techcom teams out there that are saying they produce this documentation we obviously want to make this productive and easy and great for them so just to start out with knowing this data mark what do you think is spurring the increase in adoption of video good question that's a great question and you know you gave some great statistics just about techcoms but certainly uh it's a little bit broader than that um you know i think we had written read somewhere that 82 of all internet traffic by 2022 is going to be video you know so there's this massive uh traffic flowing with video um you know and as it relates to software and particularly enterprise software uh you know buyers have become conditioned to go look for videos and it's not just um when they research products it's not just when they're using it people go to your website or our website and they start to look for videos that's their preferred medium and certainly you know the modern workforce all the millennials coming into the workforce and and younger people coming out of university are conditioned to watch videos that's how they learn and you know it's not exclusive i there are a lot of people who you know have a preference to read um from what we've heard executives that have been served when you prefer to watch videos over reading and you know studies consistently show that uh you know videos impact user experience and and customer experiences as your area of expertise make and so it's not about should we have written documentation or web-based documentation or videos it's really you have to have both and i think that technical documentation groups and customer education groups are kind of in a unique position now with this you know growth in video to to take video to scale and they haven't been there before and i guess there's probably a little bit of um googliness about this topic and i only use the google brand name in this particular situation because they're the dominant search engine that most people use to find content and it seems like google's rewarding brands for putting their content together in one place and making it easy for google to surface up those answers in one convenient landing page so we also want to of course provide video documentation right next to the traditional documentation that we offer so google can grab those little snippets and offer those up as the answers to the question that people are asking which kind of begs the question mark video content has so many uses and can be useful in so many different situations and can solve all sorts of other challenges are there any specific industries where you see video documentation is playing maybe a more important role than it used to yeah that's a great question so it's certainly this idea of uh producing video along with the documentation in in tangible goods or physical goods it's been around for a while you know if you uh buy a product whether it's an automobile or you know some manufactured product there's kind of an expectation now that there's video accompanying the product documentation um you know in the digital world all of the things you just said are are really important here and in software in particular sas companies like zoom in software or video or many of you on the phone here on the webinar here um it's not just about the user experience it goes back to what you said it's about search engine optimization when people go to look about your product having video available improves seo it improves all all of the things that you want to do to get yourself ranked first when you're promoting your product so it's become um you know it's gotten off the ground with physical goods if you will and certainly consumers are used to it but in the the b2b space in the enterprise space people are expecting the same things that they get in their life now the the you know the consumerization of the enterprise has kind of come and so and it and it's not just after they buy the product it's throughout the entire life cycle from acquisition to retention that's what's really driving this in the digital space if you will the digital products thank you for sharing that before megan asks you the next question i'll just share a small um factoid about my uh holiday experience this year so uh as is the tradition with christmas in the united states there's an exchange of packages and gifts from people that you love and care for and i received a gift that had some documentation which would not be unusual uh and what i found was really interesting was on the front page and i can't remember which brand of product this was but on the front page they had labeled the documentation with this title traditional user manual and then in huge fonts right underneath it it said you can find the video for this on our website here and they were basically saying here we have to give you this text content for those of you who need it but we we know you probably just want to watch the video i thought that was really interesting so uh just in a second that is interesting and it goes back to something mark said earlier which is that you have to have both you can't just have video and you can't just have docs you have to have both right because certain people just want to read other people just want the video and clearly video is very very very important and so when you think about how you manage both of these things and you keep them in line it sounds daunting but what are some of the things you found mark that keep people keep companies from producing videos to go along with these great documents that they're producing yeah you know and again there's there's somewhat of a separation between physical goods and digital goods so gay you know specializes in in digital products okay mostly most of you would know that as sas based type of products along the way uh the you know the challenges are enormous uh video production is time consuming expensive and you know the problem is that um it's never been easy to produce at scale it's very much relied on individual humans recording things on top of which uh it's it's not trivial to translate you know videos finding native speakers who have you know expertise in your products and so on so as we've moved into this world of of the cloud software releases are quarterly they're monthly they're more frequently you know i've met one company in the last year who has releases less than uh you know less than quarterly meaning twice a year okay is all they can do they happen to be a huge huge company because they have a huge huge platform so you can't keep up with manual recording videos so a small change that you make a little you know you change the move the icon from the right side of the screen to the left side of the screen in a piece of software or you change the name of a product or you found a typo in your documentation um all of those things means you have to re-record the video it's impossible to splice and you know get all the synchronization and things right so you know that's what users expect when they buy your product that the video they're watching is up to date you can't create more video debt as we like to call it every time you change the product yeah and mark this is a great opportunity to segue just for a second because it seems like the move toward creating structured intelligent content which is something that a lot of our viewers may be participating in their companies or have heard about and thought about doing in the future was mostly designed to solve the problem of being able to scale up and produce multiple deliverables on the schedule that they need to and be on time and be be consistent and of course it slowed them down the more that the companies grew and the more that they needed to communicate the more documentation they needed to create the more cumbersome it became became so i appreciate you explaining that could you also give us a little how how does the technology that your company makes how can it be deployed to automatically create and update video from software documentation it seems like that's a big challenge and and could you tell the readers how that works yeah no it is a big challenge and thankfully i'm surrounded by a bunch of very brilliant engineers who figured this out um but you know there's two secret ingredients to what we do one is artificial intelligence and very specifically it's an overused term but we use something natural language processing which is a machine learning technique and the other is process automation i sometimes say robotic process automation but when you hear the videos we don't want you to think these are robots speaking these are very natural voices that come out so essentially the workflow is this we take in documents they can be a technical document you know megan mentioned ditta or you know we'll come back to some other explanations later or for those of you who do customer education they're used to just sitting down and writing a video script you're going to you're going to show this you're going to click here and you're going to say this that's kind of a scripting technique so we take that and we transform it you know using this ai into speech and the way that happens is using text-to-speech technology which comes from microsoft and google and ibm and amazon we didn't create all of that but think about this way we take in a document and we read the document just like you would read it out loud and as we you're doing that we log into your software just like you were sitting down at your desktop manually recording a video except we do it through automation and then we move the mouse around your screen just like you would if you were sitting there so we're literally doing this in the cloud at scale that's amazing you're not just taking content shoving it into a video format you're also trying to equate it to where the user is in the journey that they're taking with the software product itself yeah yeah we we are synchronizing the text with the navigation of your software and as we're doing it converting the text to speech using the text-to-speech technology you know this is stuff you use every day you listen to siri or listen to alexa you listen to all these voices and the quality of this stuff we made a big bet and i'll come back to it later that this stuff was gonna you know reach uh maturity and and as you listen later i think you'll see it's it's it's there now so excellent thanks for sharing i think this is a this is an interesting time to bring up that i asked of you i kind of challenged you right i gave you some some good data content that i know is good and give you access to our tool and i wanted to see kind of how this worked and how this really looked i was maybe a little bit skeptical but you know i believe that that you had a dot so can you show what can you kind of tee this up and and uh show the demo that you went through and i just want everyone to know that i sent him stuff at i think like eight in the morning my time and by ten o'clock in the morning he had five links coming back with four different voices in a different language so anyway if you could show that that would be awesome yeah let me see if i can share my screen here i'll do that and uh share so tell me when you can see my screen all right we see yours i'm going to make it a little bigger in a second but um the way that uh our product works is we we ingested those documents and we'll come back to talking about data works uh it's very easy with data actually and most of you in technical comms know a lot about that already and we here's a list of different voices we just randomly picked as we did this i'm going to start with one i'll show you the first example this is you know just about a minute we're gonna listen to it right now and we're gonna we're gonna play this is this is actually zooming software we've never seen zoom in software before we logged in made sure that uh our automation could work and then we produced the video zoom in analytics is a collection of dashboards that display data about the way your audience is consuming or interacting with your content they don't just inform they offer actionable insights which measurably improve your performance and the effectiveness of your content select to view one of the zoom in analytics dashboards from the left panel the dashboards are arranged in a hierarchy of folders which you can open each dashboard has its specific filters based on the data displayed within the widgets click over the edit icon of a single filter to select the parameters let me uh let me return back and just uh to quickly show you this um if you don't like amy is a british voice that uh is one of them that we that's there you can choose these voices zooming analytics is a collection of dashboards that display data about the way your audience is consuming or interacting with your content next they don't inform and one more thing before we run i wasn't going to run both of those but the beauty of this is that because it starts with text it's very easy to translate now so here's uh another one analytics yeah and so i think you can see that uh there's a great opportunity here to uh to automate this that was all done through automation no human being was involved in the production of that video that's super cool and i wonder if you can just speak to a a little bit to how the the translation comes out do you have any quality metrics that you've gotten back because i know that can be problematic with large content teams yeah you know the fact of the matter is we're a young company um we're we've got customers and people are going through those processes now but um we can tell you that um you're not trying to translate you know 10 15 all at once much like your technical documentation the key to this is to chunk your content down into small consumable parts okay so all the stats show you that at about two minutes or three minutes engagement falls off any kind of video anywhere on the web so we recommend that when we take your product documentation we break it down into small snippets and the translation process that goes along with it works pretty well we have a native plug-in we just ran that through google docs and uh we had somebody review it and typically that one came out very clean but typically you'll find a very small percentage of words that don't come across because we're really translating little phrases at a time you're not trying to speak you know you're not reading a book to someone you're speaking and you're moving and then you're speaking and then you're moving so you know we get about the translation processes tend to get you know about 90 of the way there certainly if you use translation memory tools you'll get a lot further along but even off-the-shelf translation things are getting the stuff you know to to 90 plus and you do need a native speaker generally to review things before you publish it that makes a lot so it sounds like the the input the best input is something highly structured but you can work with less structured content if needed is that right or really should you have data content no no we've talked about data the advantage of dita is that it's already semantically marked up you know and when this audience knows a lot about technical communication we work with google docs we work with word we work with any xml format data obviously is a standard and we work with markdown as well what we need is a consistent writing style so we literally can take word docs that are written you know or google docs that are written as a narrative as long as you follow a pattern to say how do you navigate because what we're looking to do is say when the person said click on the gear icon we have already figured out where the gear icon is on every web page in your application and we know where you are where we need to go to and if you notice the video we actually don't do it in a completely straight line we kind of introduced some chaos to it to make it look more human so the key to this is to start with content that's just consistent in how it's written certainly when you use xml and in particular data it's already semantically enriched and that just what that does is it accelerates the machine learning so we can dump the docs in and it just gets faster results but it doesn't mean you have to have ditto or you have to have xml you have to have decent docs i think what try to to in part here in the audience is that if your content is already semantically enhanced you've augmented it with additional information that can be used as instructions for video software to understand more about your content in order to provide a better experience with that video that's output and that otherwise you'd have to kind of use learning to assess what's in the content instead of declaring exactly what's in there so i hear what you're saying mark the more metadata you can give the system the smarter the system can be is that how you'd say it yeah yes absolutely excellent and you know this is probably a good time for us to mention that today's show is sponsored by zoom in software and megan can tell our audience a little bit about what zoom in software does and how it relates to tackling the content challenges that they may have you bet so zubin's platform ingests technical product content from any source and so we actually can relate to this idea of if it's structured a lot of times it's easier for you to handle so you take it from any source it could be video it could be data content it could be just a word doc and no matter how it was created or published we pull it into a zooming cloud and then we deliver it out to a documentation portal out to your community out to a customer service site and even inside the product itself and so in this way customers will quickly and easily find the answers that they need and at the same time your organization can increase adoption as well as reduce the cost of both producing your content and reducing the cost of supporting your customers as they self-serve so to be clear can you serve up the video content next to the audio content absolutely you can serve up the video content inside the the dita content or next to or wherever you need it to be okay that's perfect all right well thanks for explaining that you can learn more by the way audience members about zoom in software at as you'd imagine zoom in software.com you can also check out the attachments and links section of our webinar viewing panel where there's some content provided by the zoom in marketing team as well as some information about their products and links to their website definitely check that out all right so let's continue this interview uh for the audience members that are watching the show was originally scheduled for 30 minutes mark we have some questions from the audience that will allow us to go a little bit over can you stay a few minutes extra be delighted excellent for the audience members who may need to leave at the half hour mark don't fret if you return to the url you're using to watch the show it will magically turn into a recording and you can catch up with the program wherever you left off so mark here's a technical question for you uh one of our viewers wants to know how are voices generated and i don't think they want the college answer for that necessarily but is it machine generated if so do they subscribe to them how is it happening great so um so the technical answer is there is a standard called ssml which is speech synthesis markup language right and ssml is a xml format but it was it's used in everything you interact with already alexa all these other things so basically what you do is you give a string of text to a text-to-speech service like amazon poly okay or microsoft cognitive services or ibm watson as it were in my uh or or google's text-to-speech engine so you're basically passing a string to those engines those engines now have hundreds and hundreds of voices not only in english but in a growing library of languages around the world that are dialectic you know in spanish you can pick uh us spanish you can pick latin american spanish you can speak spanish from spain and in english you can speak british english you can pick american english you can pick dialects from all around the world as well that we basically use that technology and what's really cool about it is in the last year both amazon and google have introduced what they call a brand voice option it's a little expensive right now uh but the fact that they introduced it what it does is it allows you to record your own voice okay and you're going to create your own voices and be able to use text-to-speech technology that speak in the voice of the person you want it to be so that's why we bet on this it's it's good now it it's so good that most people can't tell the difference between these computer generated voices when you really listen to the best of them there are some robotic voices out there our blog is to find the best ones with inflection and timbre and the things you need and they're excellent today but pretty soon you'll be able to do your own voice excellent just another question that i think is big i imagine this actually helps with accessibility but somebody is specifically asking about accessibility requirements and do you provide the options of synchronized audio video electronic documentation um and native closed captions and on audio descriptions uh that's a great question and thank you for asking it whoever asked it um we didn't show this but we certainly be happy to and there's some examples on our website uh and the website link is in the attachments um where we can turn on you can turn on and off closed captioning okay and so this is actually going to help dramatically with your accessibility uh uh requirements and so think about closed captioning a lot of people will say well we made a video and we can we can turn on closed captioning but how about this you make the video and you have an english version of your software okay then you want to record you want to see the closed captions in english but a little later you can translate it into spanish and see the english version of your software with spanish captions so even a spanish speaker even though the video is not being recorded in spanish just like you're watching netflix you can choose the subtitles that you want to see or you can later go and make a native video if your software if your video if your software is in another language so the ability to turn on and off closed captions that's kind of you get that for free because we started with the text that's what drives the speech it really does help with accessibility and can you speed up the voice so that folks who are um used to you know listening really quickly because they they aren't seeing stuff can they listen to it really fast yeah absolutely so a lot of video uh first of all the the technology supports that so we can speed things up slow things down um as you like i mean even simple things where how often we pause at the end of a phrase you know we can control in in the software as well but but you can do all of that as well and we think what more and more people are going to do is they're going to start putting their own kind of custom video players embedded into applications like zoom and software where the user gets to define their preferences i want i like amy's voice and uh it's a british voice it sounds better to me i like it but i'd like to speed it up or i'd like to slow it down and i'd like to uh have other options that have to do with what you know mouse pointers appear or how often uh what colors they appear at so this idea that products like yours megan are actually going to be able to provide a personalized video experience is really the direction we're heading in as well mark as we get deeper into this you mentioned that there's a markup language that helps with the expression of the verbal content that was derived from the text that the machine learning crawled and tried to process right that to help us make the electronic voice sound more human and what i mean by that is we used to think of markup purely as a publishing thing i can mark up the content and make it do or look a certain way and so now are we saying i can mark up the content and help it sound or mean a certain way when it's read aloud audio through audio yeah actually we did it for this demo that we just showed you and we went past it so fast but the words zoom in software in the spanish uh uh version came out suman because that z one's like an s in spanish absolutely the way we tackle that technically is you can use what are called phonemes all of you who studied phonetics in elementary school remember this and for companies that have names of products that need to be pronounced a certain way where one of our clients is uh their product comes out of a latin word and they always want the phoneme to be pronounced the one way regardless of which language it's recorded in so what's a little different technically than just when you publish things and transform things for publishing is that with voice there's a number of techniques but the simplest example i can give you is a phoneme so we went and looked at the words zoom and analytics ran it through our phoneme converter and plugged it into the system so that when we produced uh translated videos regardless of which language it comes out in the word zoomin is always pronounced zoom in exactly that's great for sharing that 2020 has been a really big challenge for many before we take some questions from the audience and hear what challenges they've been having how has coven 19 impacted demand from you to produce video at scale it's been an interesting year you know prior to covid the most video production was done by very large companies or very small team so you know we have talked to people who have you know really nice video production facilities in offices maybe multiple offices around the world they have quiet rooms high quality microphones you know the right lighting all of those kinds of things no noise so now you go home and people are recording videos at home and the dog is barking the leaf blower is blowing you know the kids are home and it's created a great challenge for a lot of people and how do you how do you get multiple people to participate in this because small and medium-sized companies are often highly dependent on subject matter experts to be part of the video process and so what kova has done is it's accelerated the need for technology like ours i mean we literally started doing our first pocs in uh in the first quarter of last year and post covid we started to see people say video is a must-have now in addition to product documentation and we need a cost-effective way to do it so i think that covid has been a we've been a beneficiary of the covid crisis uh because people see that technology is the solution to producing video not sending human beings to manually record it anymore yeah that's interesting and one of the reasons that video maybe wasn't as popular before is because people were in offices and didn't always have the best headsets to be able to actually listen to video whereas now they're sitting at home or they have their their fancy headsets like i have and so people can actually turn on a video and and listen to it at the same time it's really good one more thing sorry for those of you who are in customer education on this call i mean the world shifted from instructor-led training particularly for software products where you sold seats and people came to your classroom covert created this massive immediate need to do virtual instructor-led training but it's also created this huge demand for on-demand education and you can not do software on-demand education without video and so that's not going away we've got a permanent shift in client success and customer education postcode that's driving video and people are scrambling around trying to figure out how to solve that problem that makes a lot of sense and i i would say we're not alone in that megan and i have seen lots of products that uh have been successful because of the self-service nature of covid has forced us to have to be less reliant on other people and more reliance on themselves so we have to find out how ways to do this and while it may have been a nice to have thing before covet it's i think becoming a you have to have to have it kind of thing so why don't we have to uh one of the things we have to do is uh help our audience understand your products and the time that we have remaining could you answer a few questions real quickly megan and i will pop through some of the questions from the audience but try to give them a brief answer and if you must you could invite them to follow up with you or to read some content that you provided that might have some additional value so the first question is uh follow up on the accessibility topic we talked about earlier if the videos are produced with ai in other words no human interaction can you interrupt the system by providing additional secondary audio description track when the video is generated yeah absolutely and let me be clear about the that process of interrupting so not only i mean while they're auto generated you do you do have the ability to explicitly instruct our engine on things you want to do those could be special effects you want to do like zoom to this part of the screen or highlight something or put a red box around right just like you do with manual screen recording tools so the idea that we can layer on additional things that you need whether it's for accessibility reasons or just for customer experience reasons is how we built the technology yeah i can see that being a style guide requirement in the future like if if a brand if a brand says every time we showcase let's use that word as a brand word let's say that when we uh talk about a product and we want to showcase it we have it zoom in for example and then make it bigger and then we can say every time you encounter that tag use that function uh so i think what you're saying is you have a finer level of granular control should you need to but the end goal is to encode the content with all the instructions so you don't need to jump in and manually intervene they also ask if audio descriptions of the video provides information about actions characters scene changes and on-screen text audio description supplements the regular audio track of the program so they're basically giving us the reasons why they they want to do that let's take a different question megan why don't you grab one from the audience that you like sure the one that that i like is i've been reworded yeah they talk about editing after the fact and i guess the the basic question is does your software ever get it wrong and if so can it be changed great question so um yeah we do get it wrong sometimes in fact for those of you who are familiar with single source publishing or xml authoring or or any kind of you know transformative thing markdown or otherwise we publish something okay our process is exactly the same we start reading your docs and we keep going and going and going and then at some point if we can't disambiguate something we're going to send you a message that said hey we can't figure out what you mean here you need to tell us a little bit more to coach us along okay and that just means that um any time you want to make a change to a video um you can either upload a new you can go into your doc make a change your google doc your xml or whatever dump it back in and say preview just like you preview your html or your preview your pdf like you did for a long time and um when you're ready you can say publish and the publish will produce an mp4 and we encode in other formats as well so the idea behind this is really critical is you make a video either we can't figure it out or you found something you don't like you want to change it you don't like a word you you know it didn't sound right to you or you just decided to use a different phrase instead you just go in and get edit the text or dump back the new text and ingest the text in preview it again and it's that same iterative process and it's really important when you find typos which i know there are no typos in any product the engine does it when it does it but you have total control through a user interface to do this yourself this is a service that we provide up in the cloud it's a software as a service product but every user has their own login that they can um you know edit change run preview do all the things around in fact we're talking we've got two partnerships we're working on right now one of them was with somebody who has uh an xml based component content management system because they see it as an opportunity to just add a preview option to your existing platform you want to produce a pdf create you want to produce html great you want to produce a video great and that's how we see the future you control the editing and anytime you want to make a change you can make explicit changes that you want to make but that begs the question are you are you setting your company up to be purchased by a bigger company and and kind of it folded into their technology or do you think maybe there's a a model where you offer this as a service and then they can plug in and subscribe to your engine i don't know i'm not i'm not an angel investor who knows sorry i think i hit my mouse there and lupe started speaking um um we think it's going to be both ways we're experimenting with both there are certainly people uh in the uh doc the pub tech pubs and education world who are looking at how to leverage our technology as part of their platforms today um the majority of our clients are direct end users that we work with i think it's a stage of where we are as a company you know where this all goes in the future um you know you never build a company just to sell it but uh but you never know exactly yeah so there are a lot of questions about the inputs again and so i just want to make clear people are asking about docbook and ascii docs so even though we're talking about data really any structure it sounds like makes it easier for for your program and somebody asked specifically what it was i gave you to create that um i don't have it to pull up right now but it basically was just a really clean um ditto book and you took the first 45 seconds and and that was it um some of it was concept some of it was um procedure so it was you took a a nice chunk of it so hopefully that answers a few of the questions that are coming in there's a lot of questions thanks for marrying us sorry mark i want to give you the opportunity to offer some um valuable information to people who have a couple more questions that are not related to the inputs so first thing i was curious about does video does video sell software or are you a consulting company that provides this service sure we are a software as a service company so we're a sas company we're a software company yeah subscription the subscription you know just like you sign up for a subscription with zoom in or any other piece of software out there um we um have an onboarding process to help you understand what you need to do and how you can augment and use the platform but we're not a consulting service we sell a platform you subscribe to the platform and after you're onboarded uh it's self-service you do it yourself this viewer says voiceovers take different times and what they're asking is how do you link the speed of the video to the voice over speed and i i wonder if that's a function of your software as opposed to a decision made by a content creator well that's the magic of the engine so that's kind of the secret sauce behind all things we've patented all of this technology and that's really one of the key things which is when and you again we didn't play enough video but you know what we had to figure out is when we have to move the mouse from point a to point b in your application and we have to speak a phrase depending on who's speaking it whether it's amy or matthew or lupe they speak natively in different lengths and in fact if you watch these videos every video is of a slightly different length because we had to figure out how to synchronize the voice with the movement so we will speed up or slow down the navigation through your software depending on what needs to be done and that's uh that's some of the trick we uh we built into the technology and and gets better gets better every month you know yeah excellent well i'm a dj from a former life and a nightclub dj at that playing dance music and part of the dance music industry is synchronizing uh other versions of songs and creating remixes and in order to do that you sometimes have to speed a voice up and slow the music down in order to make them work so i think it's the same kind of process there right it's about the functional length of the video and then what needs to go in there and how do you distribute it in a way that seems human yeah sometimes exactly and sometimes i oversimplify what we do because it's just very natural what we do we figured it out technologically but think of yourself sitting down at your desktop using any of the brand name screen recording tools that you know and you are sitting down logging in moving around the software and speaking except we've done it through automation you know and uh to figure out how to optimize it and you know of course it'll get better and better over time but we've got people now in production doing this and you know scott you could probably do it better than uh with your dj background than most people could but what we've discovered is there are very few people in the enterprise who can actually do it well and consistently so technology seems to be uh right for the approach you know you know i learned something new about scott in every show so it's interesting to learn about but nonetheless somebody asked about um so because this is in the cloud can it be accessed when you're offline um yeah so here's the deal we produce mp4s at the end okay and those we are not your content distribution system ideally you want to put this into something like zoom and software uh to distribute your content okay but uh but we also produce a whole bunch of other uh uh formats for streaming and things like that we have we have a lot of great video talent in the company so the idea is that just like you produce your pdf or just like you produce an html uh package that you're going to deploy for technical support or customer education or just like you produce a scorm package if you're publishing uh e-learning content we produce mp4s they can be stuffed inside of a scorm package and run through your learning management system they can be put into a temptation people and customer experience platform like zoom in software and of course they can be run offline so but you control the distribution model we're just taking the raw materials and turning it into finished products excellent here's a couple of questions about v8 real quickly that you might be able to answer does the software offer a library of stock images and video for conceptual ideas or is it just for demonstrations um we don't offer stock images uh per se um you can of course uh use any images you want in the production of the uh of the product so like it's very typical when someone makes a video that you'll have someone speaking and a slide will pop up or a slide with an image will pop up that slide with an image can come from any library that you've told us you want it to come from or can be made automatically by uh by video and and the other thing i want to say this is really kind of i forgot to mention this because we were trying to compress our original script here uh was um we capture screenshots as we're making the videos so if you're a tech writer think about this here's version one of the software two weeks later again somebody moves the hamburger icon from the right side of the minute screen to the long side of this video every screenshot is now invalid we make screenshots we capture them as you're going and if you link them to your tech docs you've just eliminated all of the work to replace screenshots in your tech doc so we can work with external images or create images from the content as well that's brilliant awesome can a viewer of today's show uh get a free trial or interact with you in some way to kind of have the experience that you gave megan um and and before you answer that i want to also put out a kind of i'm marrying a few questions that we haven't answered into one just to kind of get you and megan to see if you would commit to it um some of the viewers seem to be interested in the process that megan and you went through and so they wanted to know if you might write about or make a video that shows how you took megan's content and did what you did with it so that the viewers could better understand that yeah yeah that's a great idea let's do a blog yeah sounds like friends uh yeah you know um so first of all back to the free trials um i've said this to everybody we've talked to uh we spent about a year in stealth mode from when the company got started to last july writing the software filing the patents doing and doing a bunch of pocs with some customers who are very gracious to uh allow us to uh work with them sure we launched the public site last july six months ago literally okay uh by the end of september we had a bunch of very well known very one one or two very large publicly traded software companies already producing videos with the software um but in every case it's always a free trial we are not ready to tell you we're 100 sure any software anything will always work uh that would be a little bit uh disingenuous so we what we like to do is tell everybody here's what we need to do let's talk a free trial is a pretty simple process we sign an nda uh you send us some sample docs and you give us a login to your software okay we need a username and a password to a sandbox to your free trial to wherever you produce your tech talks or you record your customer education videos and we're happy to do them because that's the best way for us to demonstrate to you that it will work one last question if you can answer it quickly about the translation process one of our viewers asked does the software that you've made work on the translated documents themselves or the translation of the video script is that a separate task and is done later and then converted with text to speech so um you produce you create the initial video than whatever your base language is you know in many cases english but whatever that base language is and then you run that script or that doc through a translation process either internally in the product or externally using any of the well-known translation memory products and services you're all familiar with already so you export the english you import your language you preview it you hit preview and it records it in that language so uh the answer is very simply that the captions come along for free the closed captioning comes along for free what you're really doing is there's a workflow just like you translate your documents it's 100 identical okay send it out bring it back in and again instead of producing a pdf for html produce a video that's how it works well thank you mark it appears we're running out of time as we as we find ourselves many times megan and i have it we're gonna have more for you then we have time aloud so thank you for joining us mark and making time to be on the show today and thanks to the audience for being here too we really appreciate it thank you both very much for having us really appreciate it yeah thank you mark and to the audience before you sign off go ahead and find the rate this tab it's in your webinar viewing panel give us a one to five star rating let us know what you liked about the show what you maybe didn't like about the show help us get better for you excellent i'll second that as well and to the viewers who joined the show late and wondered what is the web address for the video company you i can help you out a little bit if you look in the attachments and links section of your webinar viewing panel you'll find links to the software company's website as well as a link to uh our presenter our guest today's uh linkedin page and some additional content from the sponsors and uh content about video that would help you understand and reach out to mark where you can schedule a call uh and find out whether he can help you make some video documentation but before you go i encourage you to be on the lookout for invitation to our next content advantage show it's scheduled for uh tuesday january the 19th we do these shows every two weeks when we are hoping to chat with sarah winters who you may know as sarah richards about the emerging discipline known as content design we're still in the works trying to make sure that this uh meeting can be set up on time and so look for an email from us uh inviting you to join us uh to see sarah in action you'll learn a lot about the emerging discipline of content design and be able to ask questions so until we see you again uh please stay safe be well and keep doing good work we look forward to seeing you on another upcoming the content advantage talk show thanks for joining us and thanks mark and megan thank you ensure your customers find the answers they need with zoom in bring together product content from all teams and sources to deliver a unified personalized content experience check us out at www.zoomansoftware.com you