Introducing video transcripts

20 Mar 2021 | in Updates, Updates/Announcements


I’m proud to share an exciting update that I’ve been working on for a while. Have you ever found yourself wondering: I swear I heard Steve Jobs say this in a keynote, or an interview, or was it a speech? One of those in the early 2000s, but… which one was it?

Well, you need not worry about this anymore — as some of the videos in our collection now feature transcripts! You’ll identify them thanks to the small CC ( ) icon next to their name in the video galleries, as per below. You’ll notice we also include timestamps at each speaker change or narrative breaks, so you can easily jump to the right point in the video.

The vision is to eventually have ALL of Steve Jobs’s recorded words transcribed, so they can all be searched and found in a few seconds. I am planning to adding search to the “Watch” section of the website to that effect (and of course, Google is still your friend in the meantime).

It will take a while to get to that end state though, and I’m starting with a small collection of some of my favourites videos, as well as the most recent additions:

  1. 1983 Macintosh introduction at the Boston Computer Society
  2. 1988 NeXT Cube introduction
  3. 1990 NeXTstation introduction
  4. 1990 Library of Congress video
  5. 1991 internal NeXT strategy
  6. 1991 “Ten Years of the PC” interview
  7. 1992 NeXTSTEP 3.0 demo
  8. 1995 Triumph of the Nerds interview (aka “The Lost Interview”)
  9. 1997 WWDC closing chat
  10. 1998 iMac introduction
  11. Of course, the 2007 Macworld (iPhone introduction)
  12. 2007 D5 Interview by Walt Mossberg
  13. And last but not least, the Joint interview with Bill Gates from that same conference.

I’ve added these new transcripts I made to the couple ones that have already been done — right now this only includes the Stanford commencement speech, the Smithsonian 1995 interview and another 1990 interview.

I hope you’re as excited as I am! Please share your feedback in the comments or on Twitter.

PS: while working on this, I discovered a great website called NotesKey, which references all speakers, demos, videos, memorable moments or jokes, for almost all Apple events (I noticed a couple Apple Expo keynotes are missing) from 1997 to 2018. It also lets you search for a particular speaker or demo across all of them. This is something I had thought of building originally, but there is no need as the site does it perfectly (here’s Macworld 2007 as an example) — make sure to check it out!