Transcripts - Refmatter

When a source publishes captions, Refmatter derives a transcript during acquisition and keeps it as a durable derivative next to the poster frame. Manual captions are preferred; automatic captions are used when they are all the source has.

In the reference

"machineDerived": {
  "transcript": {
    "mediaId": "01a0a1c2-…",
    "language": "en",
    "source": "captions",
    "segmentCount": 214
  }
}

source is captions for a human-authored track or automatic_captions for the platform’s speech recognition. null means the source had no usable track; the reference is still complete.

Full text and timings

curl https://api.refmatter.com/v1/references/$REFERENCE_ID/transcript \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REFMATTER_API_KEY"

const transcript = await refmatter.references.transcript(reference.id);
for (const segment of transcript.segments) {
  console.log(segment.startMs, segment.endMs, segment.text);
}

{
  "referenceId": "01a0a1b1-…",
  "mediaId": "01a0a1c2-…",
  "language": "en",
  "source": "captions",
  "segments": [
    {
      "startMs": 1200,
      "endMs": 3360,
      "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants"
    }
  ],
  "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants …"
}

The transcript object can also be downloaded as JSON through GET /v1/media/{mediaId}/download-url with the mediaId from the summary.

Language choice

English is preferred when several tracks exist; otherwise the first manual track wins, then automatic captions. Per-request language selection is planned.

Retention

Transcripts are Tier A: they stay as long as the reference exists, including after the media bytes expire. A source with no captions gets no transcript; speech recognition on the acquired audio is planned as a fallback.