I decided to build the entire thing using GitHub Actions and GitHub Issues.

Make it easy for people to install and run their own copies.

Make it as inexpensive to run as possible-ideally free.

Inspired by the recent release of OpenAI’s Whisper, I decided to build a tool that would make it easier to extract captions and transcripts from videos on social media sites. The goal was to build prototypes of tools that could be used by their community of investigators-most of whom are volunteers working from home with little-to-no budget, and often with limited technical skills (they can use tools very effectively but they might not be comfortable writing code or using the command-line). The theme of the hackathon was “General Digital Investigation Tools”. Wikipedia has a good list-highlights include identifying the suspects behind the Skripal poisoning case. They have broken a LOT of impressive stories over their eight year lifespan. They specialize in open source intelligence-which, confusingly, does NOT mean “open source software”-this is a much older usage of the term that describes the use of publicly available information to gather intelligence.

Here’s my video introducing the new tool: Bellingcatīellingcat describe themselves as an “independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects”. I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online videos.

A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions

Extract subtitles from youtube video