Hi! My name’s Amir. I’m a Web3 Community Manager and a podcast host. To improve the reach of my podcast, 2 months ago, I tried the Rask.ai platform, and have edited over 10 hours of footage since. In this review, I’ll go into the challenges Rask.ai can solve for you, its features, and the pros/cons of the platform.
What Is Rask.ai, and Why Did I Buy It?
Essentially, Rask.ai is a platform that uses AI for video/audio localization and repurposing. By repurposing, I mean auto reframing to vertical format, and auto-editing long videos to capture the most interesting moments.
Rask.ai poses itself as a platform that has all the AI features for content makers in one place, a one-stop-shop of some sort. In one subscription, you get all the AI tools you would need to make your video content better.
The main purpose that I had in mind when checking out Rask.ai was to increase the reach of my podcast on TikTok and YouTube. The podcast originally is in Kazakh, but to expand the potential audience and potential advertisers, I was looking for ways to target the English-speaking market as well.
Price, Interface, and Functionality
The platform is very flexible when it comes to pricing: you have 3 options to choose from, which vary by the price, the amount of minutes, and other available features. Honestly, I think the only metric you should really look at is the amount of minutes, as it will influence your work the most. I’ve picked the second plan, Creator Pro. It includes 100 minutes of edited footage per month and costs me $120. They also offer a plan for $50 and 25 minutes, as well as a corporate plan - $600 and 500 minutes. The biggest plan the platform offers is enterprise, which starts at 2000 minutes with a custom price.
Note that all prices are correct if you pay annually - plans with monthly payments will be ~15% more expensive. Last month, I had 2 podcasts instead of one, and I ran out of minutes on my regular plan. However, you can always buy additional minutes at a $3 rate.
Setting up the account is very easy (as it should be in 2024): you can use your Google account to log in or create the account with your email. The interface is very clean and isn’t overloaded by different buttons and links. You have FAQ and customer support at the top right corner, accessible from any page, so if you get a bit confused, there’s always that.
I can’t say that I’m a tech guru of any kind, but I got used to the website in a matter of minutes. I’ve never worked with a mobile version of the site as I always store all raw footage on my Mac, but if you’re editing a small TikTok/Reels, you can easily do it from your phone.
What Does Rask.ai Do, and How Do I Use It?
The platform has 2 main features: localization and shorts. Let’s start with the first one, which became a selling point for me.
You download a video from your device or paste a link from YouTube or Google Drive, choose the number of speakers, original language, and the language you want to translate the video to, and click “translate.” After that, the magic begins. In a matter of minutes (depending on the length of the video), you get the same video but translated to a different language. The voice-over keeps the voice’s depth, tone, and emotion, and even creates a lip sync, so the video footage is similar to the audio. How do I use that feature?
Before discovering Rask.ai, in order to reach the English-speaking market, I was adding EN subtitles to all my podcasts. However, that approach was far from ideal as I was always encountering many barriers:
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Time-consumption. The current speech-to-text AI solutions are very far from perfect. On 100 AI-generated subtitles, I was getting ~30 errors that I needed to edit manually. Scale that to hours of footage and thousands of text, and you get yourself many hours of manual work.
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Accessibility. Subtitles can’t be a permanent solution to expand your foreign audience, especially when it comes to podcasts. When was the last time you paid attention to video footage on a podcast? People listen to them while exercising, cooking, cleaning, and working. My podcast gets 40% more listeners on Spotify and Google Podcasts (which don’t have video) vs YouTube (which has video), meaning that people aren’t looking at the screen and subtitles when listening.
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Retention. Even if a person bothers to actively read the subtitles, they still are getting less than people watching the original. Many intonations, jokes, or facial expressions are just not working when perceptive through text. Listeners are too busy reading to actually relax and enjoy the podcast.
The Rask.ai platform solved all these problems for me. The amount of manual work I had to do had decreased to practically 0, since in 2 months of using the platform, I haven’t encountered any errors in translations. The retention improved a lot as well: YouTube has statistics that show you how many people watch your videos until the end, and this number significantly improved, since your listeners can actually LISTEN instead of reading.
Another feature that I didn’t even know about when getting the subscription to Rask.ai is Shorts. Basically, it takes your hour-long footage and splits the most interesting moments into many short vertical videos.
As you probably know, one of the best ways to promote your podcast in 2024 is to share these videos on TikTok, Shorts, and Reels, because these platforms have much better recommendation systems than YouTube, and putting the link to the full podcast in your bio.
That’s how I personally discovered many of my favorite podcasts and began to host them myself. Before discovering that feature, I had a friend on a part-time salary doing that for me, because apart from the podcast, I also have a full-time job in Web3 that is taking a significant part of my day.
Creating 15 short videos from one podcast took us about 5-6 hours of manual work since you have to fully watch the podcast, then edit all shorts separately, and add some graphics and subtitles.
When I discovered a shorts feature on Rask.ai, the same amount of work took me from 5 to 10 minutes (again, depending on the length of the footage). This let me cut my editorial costs down to the sole price of my Rask.ai plan, without having to pay the salary to a whole person doing that. And you say AI won’t take our jobs :)
There are a couple of smaller features that I haven’t really tested a lot until today, but I’m planning on exploring them in the future as well. For example, subtitles generation, and API for translations. The company also plans on integrating some features that I’m really excited about: AI video generation (Like MidJourney, but videos), and Zapier integration.
Pros, Cons, and Who Can Use It?
In conclusion, Rask.ai won’t make your video content more interesting or helpful and won’t make you a superstar overnight. However, with the right distribution strategy and exciting content, Rask.ai will significantly cut your editorial costs, saving you hundreds of dollars on people who translate and edit your content for you, as well as save you A LOT of time, letting you focus on the stuff that really matters: scripts, topics, guests, and other things that make your content better.
Rask.ai is a great solution for podcast hosts like myself, social media or community managers producing content for their companies, or TikTok and Instagram influencers that focus on short video content.
Pros:
- Clean and simple interface
- Precise translations
- Multiple features in one subscription
Cons:
- Relatively high prices
- Not all features are ready yet