Harnessing AI for Inclusive Media: Jeffrey Paul's ZioTag Revolution

Unlock the transformative potential of AI in media with our exclusive conversation featuring Jeffrey Paul, CEO and co-founder of ZioTag. Discover how an innovative AI-powered video platform is making video content more accessible and searchable. Jeffrey shares the inspirational story behind ZioTag, a tool initially created to navigate lengthy tech meetup videos in New York City, and how it has revolutionized accessibility for educational institutions like North Carolina State University's Genetic Engineering Society. Learn how ZioTag's automated tables of contents and transcripts are opening new doors for people with disabilities to engage with educational and professional content.

In this episode, we delve into the cutting-edge advancements in AI technology that are tailored for specific industries, including pharmaceuticals and government. Jeffrey discusses the challenges and unexpected opportunities encountered on ZioTag's journey, such as discovering the vast market potential within corporate environments and the podcasting world. We also reflect on the importance of embracing failure as a crucial learning opportunity, especially for younger individuals. Get insights into the future of AI and accessibility in media, and understand the significance of maintaining accuracy to avoid misinformation. This is a must-listen episode for anyone interested in the intersection of AI, media, and accessibility.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.

Speaker 2 0:21

I am so thrilled to have Jeffrey Paul here today. He is the CEO and co-founder of ZioTag and we met recently at Podcast Movement and I knew that as soon as we met that you needed to be on the Mediascape show and also I need to figure out how to infuse you into every one of my classes.

Speaker 3 0:44

Oh, my goodness so.

Speaker 2 0:45

Jeffrey, thank you for being here.

Speaker 3 0:48

Oh, thank you for having me, and what a wonderful experience podcast movement was for us. It was our first podcasting show and I didn't know what to expect. Yeah but boy, having met you and other key players really made a huge difference to us.

Speaker 2 1:05

Power of connection. I think a lot of people come to conferences they don't know what to expect. This one, I think, had great results for a lot of people.

Speaker 3 1:13

Oh, my goodness, yes.

Speaker 2 1:14

I'm glad to hear that for you as well. Now you are an AI-powered video platform.

Speaker 3 1:20

Yes.

Speaker 2 1:21

And it's not just for podcasts, right, it's for video and audio of all kinds. I want you to. Can you take us through what exactly the product is and your why?

Speaker 3 1:35

Good, good. So probably best to start with the why and then that'll connect us to where we are now. So the why is very active. We're in the New York area, new York City area, and I'm very active in the local meetups. So if you're ever in New York at night, there's always a meetup to go to somewhere and you can meet some interesting people. Maybe you get some free pizza and a Coke once in a while, but usually it's part of the great things of being in a major city like New York. You know you can always meet new and interesting people.

Speaker 3 2:08

And these meetups the tech meetups, particularly Disruptive Technologists is one. There's another one called New York Tech Alliance, and they create community for young professionals, young entrepreneurial types, and they always have interesting content. But the meetings are like maybe two hours long, two and a half hours long. They're always recorded, they're always put up on YouTube somewhere, and out of those two, two and a half hours, there's probably five minutes of real golden nugget that you're interested in. But where to find it and how to get to it is difficult.

Speaker 3 2:44

So the problem that we were solving when we first started building our platform is we wanted to build an AI power platform that would generate a table of contents for a video. So Gutenberg invented the printing press and six months later somebody invented the table of contents. Because that's how you find things. You wouldn't spend $300 on a textbook if it didn't have a table of contents. Why would you watch a one or two hour video if you didn't know, you didn't have the navigation, you didn't have the visual roadmap, what was in there? So that's where we wanted the product to read any kind of audio or video streaming on the internet and make a transcript out of it and then make a table video or audio, make it searchable by search engines that we all know and love and depend on every day. Fantastic.

Speaker 2 3:55

And particularly, you wanted to make sure that you're an accessible and inclusive brand, and that's something that I think a lot of people forgot about when they were starting to build websites and apps and other platforms. But we definitely see as something important and vital and you cannot leave out a large part of the audience, which is missing out because they either can't read or they don't have access to the audio. They either can't read or they don't have access to the audio.

Speaker 2 4:26

They don't know how to navigate a website to find what they want, or a video or an audio.

Speaker 3 4:30

Yes, and it's funny, Our first couple of customers were higher ed universities. One of them happened to be North Carolina State the Genetic Engineering Society. It's the people who, when they mapped the genome back in the 90s these are the people who mapped the genome and they have a fabulous video library of the greatest minds and genetics around the world. You go there to tell your story and they document it, and they have two, three, four hundred one hour two hour videos of these great minds talking about it. And they were manually tagging it. Oh my God, and it was up. So they found us to be one of our partners. We partnered with transcription companies, so one of our partners held a webinar for higher ed and that's where they found us and we greatly reduced the amount of work that they had to do and we created a much better product than they were doing. They happened to work in Vimeo and we work at Vimeo and that's fine. And then, as part of the procurement process, we got to the accessibility's office to check mark us is that, you know, anything that goes on a higher ed website has to be accessible.

Speaker 3 5:39

The American Disabilities Act, which recently had its 34th anniversary. It was early in the 90s when that was passed. I know that it was September. So, as we're working with the disabilities office woman, the director there, she asked us to make a little bit of changes to our player and how that worked and stuff like that. I would call it window dressing. So we did.

Speaker 3 6:02

We went back to her a couple of weeks later with the changes and she looked at it and she said, oh my God, and this is via Zoom. And I'm like, oh man, my deal's in peril. I said, oh my God, what? And she said this is huge for people with disabilities. Do you know what you have? I said no, no, tell me.

Speaker 3 6:34

And she said if you're blind and you're going to watch a one hour video, you use a screen reader, like everybody does, and you listen to the transcript for an hour and you may find what you're looking for. You may not With your table of contents. They can easily toggle through the table of contents, read the summaries and then they can decide do they actually want to listen to it? And she said the same thing for people who have hearing loss.

Speaker 3 6:58

You know, if they're going to read a transcript, a one-hour transcript, they got to start at the beginning, get to the end. It takes them at least an hour With your stuff. They can just read the summaries of the chapters and then they can flip to the transcript and read it there. And if you're neurodiverse, if you have attention deficit, things like that, you need the structure of a table of contents. And then finally she says hysterical, you know, jeff, you don't have to be disabled to like your product. And I said, oh, thank you. So that was the beginning of our accessibility journey and it's opened up a lot of doors for us.

Speaker 2 7:37

Yeah, I can imagine, and I'll just note that, as somebody who was diagnosed with ADD not as much of the hyper right, but as an adult, I've finally been able to see how it has affected everything I do, including how I learn. I need to see a lot of different things to keep my interest. I need to work with content in different ways.

Speaker 3 8:00

And.

Speaker 2 8:00

I take that into my teaching because I know my students are all showing up learning different ways, so I try to incorporate podcasts, video, visual elements, small breaks for discussion, of course, and it makes it a much richer experience, I think, for myself and for, hopefully, for my students.

Speaker 3 8:19

Sure.

Speaker 2 8:19

And I love this other aspect that I pull in. So, for instance, if a student can't make the live class and they need to do the replay, they have a number of options to find out the information they really need. Right, you work with a lot of higher education institutions. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the different use cases?

Speaker 3 8:42

Sure, so, yeah, we're early recruited to higher ed. We have a partner called Keltura and they're a very large video platform company that I think they have like I don't know 3000 universities run them, anything like that and they found us at a higher ed conference, the Educause conference, and they said, oh my God, every one of our customers is going to need this. So we signed a reseller deal for them and our product is embedded so any one of their customers can order our table of contents, you know, directly from their console. And that was really good.

Speaker 3 9:18

And the use cases of like we have a professor out of Gonzaga University that records all of his lectures puts them on YouTube, puts them in a Zotag player, processes them and then at the end of the semester he has all of his lectures around his topics and his course available in the gallery. So if you're preparing yourself for the final things like that, you can search the gallery and you can find exactly what you're looking for by concept. So what we do is one of the brilliant things about our product is we pull out the thoughts, the ideas and the concepts that are being discussed. They are not just the spoken word, which is a very powerful thing, and we also have professors at Georgetown that use us, and we're currently in a pilot at NYU with their NYU stream offer and the use case there is. We're working with the engineering group and a couple other groups and the implementation there is professor will record his class.

Speaker 3 10:23

All of the classrooms are wired.

Speaker 3 10:25

You just press a button and everything gets recorded, and then, when it's done, they upload it to their version of Kaltura.

Speaker 3 10:29

And they press a button and everything gets recorded, and then, when it's done, they upload it to their version of Kaltura and they press a button and an hour later they get the video back with a transcript, with the table of contents embedded within their player. And we have a new offer out and that's the Xeo Notes, which is a think of it as a Cliff Notes version of the table of contents, so they can push that out. So in a one hour video you might get a little two page outline of the Xeo Notes and it has the chapter, the title, the summary, the timestamps, and then you can open it up as a PDF or an HTML document and then you can read it that way and you can click on it. It takes you right there as well. So an hour after the lecture is done they can push it out to their audience and say here's a lecture, here's a transcript, here's a video, here's a table of contents and here's the cliff note summary of it. So it's a really, really nice deployment.

Speaker 3 11:35

That's very quick and that is definitely a game changer.

Speaker 2 11:38

Yeah, I want to ask about being an AI platform, right? Do you ever see the AI mess up? Did it take you a long time to train your model?

AI Technology in Video Accessibility

Speaker 3 11:49

Yes, so we were generative AI before generative AI got popular, and so one of our first customers was a very large video aggregator education aggregator and they had been manually doing this for 10 years, so we actually were able to train on their data. This is going back four or five years ago, so our stuff was really good when we got going. And then we completed a large project for them about 50,000 hours of educational content and that required a lot of training on our AI and we have the world's best editor. We have a curator's console that's included in your ZOTF subscription and, unabashedly, it's the best in the industry.

Speaker 3 12:37

And I hear that from my customers and I hear it from other vendors. They say, wow, I mean significant vendors. They say, wow, you guys have put a lot of thought into it. And I said, well, we had challenges. You have to process 50,000 hours of educational video. That's going into colleges, it's going into middle school and grammar school. There's no room for error. You have to be right. Anyway, yes, so our AI has gotten much better and it's really good. Right now we back it up with some other large language models that we include and then for our enterprise customers, we're able to include their vocabularies and their large language models in it. So if you're going to go into a pharmaceutical company, they have a very specific vocabulary that they use and we can include their stuff in our analysis. So, as they get very specific about those terms, we're able to leverage the work that they've already done.

Speaker 2 13:35

Fantastic, and you. As we talked about at the beginning, we met at Podcast Movement.

Speaker 3 13:40

Yes.

Speaker 2 13:41

So now you're moving into the podcast world.

Speaker 3 13:45

Yeah, what was the aha?

Speaker 2 13:45

moment that made you think, hey, this is an untapped market. What was the aha moment that made you think, hey, this is an untapped market?

Speaker 3 13:51

I have to tell you, historically we're enterprise, large enterprise thing like that and I always thought that there might be fit for us at podcast movement and the Thursday before the conference I just found out about it I signed up. It was in Washington, so it was a drive for us, not a big deal and then I was emailing back and forth with the conference people themselves, jared and Christy and I said, hey, I'm new to the space, I'm going there really to educate myself about it, see who the players are. And by Sunday night we had a booth. And Monday night we drove down and we set up Tuesday morning with our booth, not understanding what we were going to see but knowing it was going to be good, and the reception was unbelievable.

Speaker 3 14:41

When people understood what we do and my understanding of the podcasting market grew exponentially and then I realized how big it was. The good news is that everybody's moving to YouTube and we work on YouTube. We work very well, we're a YouTube partner there and while there are a lot of large enterprises and individual podcasters that understand the value of, we help their content be discovered, searched and navigated and having the Xeo Notes capability to push out with their emails when they're announcing their new podcast. It breaks down the barriers between two different media types content email content, document content and audio. So we break down those barriers and we make it much simpler to merge the two.

Speaker 2 15:36

Now going back to the fact that you are primarily enterprise, then have you had to shift your model a little bit to make the pricing palatable for the indie podcaster, for the one professor?

Speaker 3 15:50

Yes, and for professors we have special packages for them. For anybody that was at the conference, we're running a promotion of $9.95 a year, $1,000 for a year. You get a year's use of the platform and 100 hours of video audio to process it, and for it you get the platform, you get the player, you get the gallery. You get the player, you get the gallery, you get the transcription, you get the table of contents, you do all of that. So it turns out to be roughly $10 per hour, you know, and you also get Xeo notes for that. So it's really our entree into the market from there and then after that, you know, we'll have pricing for them to continue to use just the platform, if you just want to use the platform, and then if you want to process more videos, we'll certainly have packages for that. So, yes, we have an announcement with another group that you'll hear about in a couple of weeks that they'll be promoting that as well.

Speaker 2 16:47

Okay, yeah, that was my next question. I'm an indie podcaster, oh great, with two podcasts my podcast at USC, which we publish once a week and either I or my co-host or both of us interview the guests. And then my other podcast, your Brand Amplified, but I publish four episodes a week for that one, okay, and so I would need a lot more content. But I'm still an indie podcaster. So, weighing out the cost-benefit analysis but knowing that if I'm searched more, then that brings in more revenue.

Speaker 3 17:22

Yeah, and I'll tell you, we're certainly open and we didn't go there not to sell things and we're doing our best to figure that out. And we also found out, as most podcasters while they do that they have a day job, that they're doing podcasting for a large government organization, department of Defense, other corporate entities, and they say, well, I could use it, but I could really use it at work. So those were some surprising opportunities that presented themselves, absolutely.

Speaker 2 17:54

Your background in your career was in sales, mm-hmm marketing. What brought you into this space?

Speaker 3 18:03

Sure, so this is actually my second video startup. The first one was we started a week before YouTube 2006, and we sold in 2009, where we were building the table of contents around long format video, and it was a manual process and our customers were the Army, accenture, ibm, astrazeneca, capgemini anybody with training video loved our stuff. That was good. We sold it to a group who was doing a roll up in the video space and I always stayed close to my customers and I knew, when AI got powerful enough and got cheap enough, the guy who figured out how to automate building the table of contents. Then you have something important, and our journey here started 2019, 2020, when you could buy AI as a service from the major vendors.

Speaker 2 19:00

Wow, amazing. What are some other things that you see in the landscape with AI and with accessibility in video and audio moving forward?

Speaker 3 19:24

sure we don't make false conclusions and we don't add to the fake world. You know it's terrible now, but you know truth is at risk right now when you see things on the internet. So our paradigm is we take the spoken word and we summarize it for people and put it into a nice format, but we leave the original content there, so we're not destroying it, so we're acting as a reference point and then you can click on us and then you can hear it for yourself the original content. And we made that decision early on and I'm so glad we did, because when you have these groups that are chopping up video and doing their own summaries and things like that, and I don't know how you get a 60 minute video down to six minutes and keep everything that's important in there, you know that's a risk I'm not prepared to take and I don't think it's fair and I don't think it's honest.

Speaker 3 20:14

From there, so early on, we said we don't want to change anything, we just want to make it easier to find, to get to there. So from that point of view, I knew we were right then and I really know we're right now. From there, and in the accessibility world, we're leading there we're leading because not only are we making the videos accessible and by that it's like window dressing. Some people say we change the font and we change the colors and all that stuff oh, you're a video player. We make that more accessible, we make the content in the video accessible, and that's a quantum leap. There's nobody doing that and when people see us they say, oh my God, yes, and not only for people with disabilities, but really for everybody. So from that point of view, you know we're a leading vendor there. We've got the scars and the bruises to show it there, but we have a lot of people supporting us and it's great that our word is getting out and we're making an impact with groups like the Podcast Movement Group and other groups like that.

Speaker 2 21:31

Yeah.

Speaker 3 21:32

Amazing, jeff, how much of the audience is affected by accessibility challenges. Oh my goodness, thank you so much for asking. It's the right thing to make your content accessible to everybody you know, and it's also a very profitable thing. And this is one thing that I've learned from major leaders of industry, industries that you know, and it turns out that 15% of our population and 15% of the world has some type of disability, be it vision, hearing, learning, neurodiverse, things like that. They think differently. It's 15%. So if we just think of our country, here in the US, it's north of 45 million people that are not connecting with your content. So to make it accessible and to make the content accessible is not only the right thing to do because you want to be talking to these people.

Speaker 3 22:22

Accessible is not only the right thing to do because you want to be talking to these people, but it's a smart thing to do if you're a business and I had the privilege of speaking with the senior executives of a professional sports league that you know and I know very well.

Speaker 3 22:35

Unfortunately I'm on a non-disclosure so I can't give the details of it, but their sense was that this is an audience that they want to connect with.

Speaker 3 22:44

And if you run a professional sports league, you want to recruit fans and you want to recruit fans for life and they know the specific numbers, the people that they're not talking to now, that they want to be talking to, to recruit them as fans. And if you recruit somebody as a fan early on and you keep them as a fan for life, that's really good for your business, it's really good for them because they can participate in it, and it's really good for your business. So not only is this the right thing to do, but it's a smart thing to do, and those numbers have been validated elsewhere. So I would say anybody who's producing content right now, you should go out of your way to make sure your content is accessible, and that's all the things that are included in the American with Disabilities Act and things like that, as well as leading products like Zotag and Zonotes, to make it easy not only for that 15% of the population, but for everybody else.

Speaker 2 23:40

Fantastic that market opportunity. 45 million people, that's huge.

Speaker 3 23:46

Yes, yes, and I'm glad we're able to be part of the solution.

Speaker 2 23:51

If somebody wants to connect with you and perhaps try out the product, talk to you more about their use case. What's the easiest? Yeah?

Speaker 3 23:58

that'd be fine. Yeah, just contact me jeffzeotagcom or get to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to give you a free trial of it. We have a 15 minute onboarding process. It's very, very simple to use. Anybody can use the product and a one hour video roughly takes about five minutes to process and then you're done. And then you look at it and say, oh, this is kind of cool. And then you push it out on your social media, you push it out on your website and it's a really simple. You know, it's a very low friction thing for the power that we deliver. We did a beautiful front end to make it simple.

Speaker 2 24:36

Fantastic. Is there any one piece of advice, jeff, that you would give to somebody who is producing audio video? They're looking at AI. They want to get into this market, this field, as a user.

Speaker 3 24:52

Yeah, yeah, as a user, I would encourage you. It's funny. I have a fabulous advisor. She's also an investor.

Embracing Failure for Growth

Speaker 3 25:02

Her name was Esther Dyson and she's a well-known angel. At any one time she invested in 30, 40 companies and she was an early supporter of Zotac. And she said always make new mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not doing enough. So I would encourage people to one try new things, push it, test it to see if it works. Just as if we didn't know the podcast thing was going to be a good venue for us. We were delighted when we were there and I would say trust your instincts and if you're not always trying new things. So you try 10 new things and seven of them fail miserably, two do okay and one's a real gem. You know what? You wouldn't have found the one gem if you didn't run all 10. And I find that in younger people and I have three adult sons, but a lot of them are perhaps afraid to try something new, fear of failure, and I would say if you're not failing, you're not doing enough that is sage advice, because those mistakes aren't really mistakes.

Speaker 2 26:16

they're lessons to learn, to improve.

Speaker 3 26:19

Yeah, I learn more from my failures than I learn from my successes.

Speaker 2 26:22

Yeah, this has been a wonderful conversation, jeffrey. Paul. I have really appreciated your time, your expertise and where you see the future of accessibility going, particularly in the video and audio world, which we know is one of the main ways that we communicate these days and learn so thank you, yeah, and thank you so much for having me. Absolutely, and thank you to everybody who's watching or listening to this episode of Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers. We will be back again with another great guest next week.

Speaker 1 26:55

To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.