Over at http://public.youtranscript.com/ is a site, which is a bit special, named YouTranscript.

The folks there have developed a streamlined system for making transcripts of any YouTube video having good quality audio, uses the English language and is less than 10 minutes in length.  In fact YouTranscript is part of a bigger business which performs professional video and audio transcription services for competitive rates using a 3 stage process of transcription, editing and proof reading.  The service can perform transcription of any audio and video recordings that capture conference calls, speeches and sermons for example.

The YouTube videos on the YouTranscript site are transcribed for free as a public service and more will be added in the future.  There are currently about 800 transcribed YouTube videos and a search facility as well as a selection of videos arranged in categories is provided on the main page.

Individual video pages are quite cool.  On the left you get the video embedded into the page and the centre column is the text of the video transcription. As the video plays, that part of the transcript text is underlined.  The text itself is clickable and clicking on a sentence skips to that part of the video - something it does almost instantaneously.

What's great about the YouTranscript project is that they're unlocking content from the audio in videos and making it available on the indexable web and making it searchable and linkable.  This is not only a benefit to those people looking for particular content which up to now only existed in a video, but also could be very useful for the deaf and hard of hearing as well as a really useful tool for learning.

Also notable is the webserver software serving pages at youtranscript.com which is the lightweight AntiWeb httpd written by Doug Hoyte and which should be perfectly suited for this kind of high throughput, low-latency website.

I think YouTranscript could be a very popular site in fairly short order and I'm looking forward to more transcribed videos.  You can submit ideas for videos to transcribe via a contact form.