Sample files
Me at the zoo
The first video on YouTube, now a vertical short
Eighteen seconds, filmed at San Diego Zoo and uploaded on 23 April 2005 by one of YouTube's own founders. It is the oldest video on the platform, and it is here because it is the shortest honest test we know: one voice, no music, nothing to hide behind.
- It was filmed wide, because nothing else existed. The vertical feed came much later: TikTok reached most of the world in 2018, YouTube Shorts in 2020. This clip is from 2005 and has outlived both formats it never had.
- Paste the link, press portrait, and the same eighteen seconds come back as a short with the words burned in. No editor, no timeline, no export settings.
- Feeds start muted, so the captions are what actually gets watched. Here every word is timed to the voice, in any of sixteen languages.
- Nobody needs the transcript of this one. That is the point: you already know what is said, so you can judge what we did to it.
A short, joking voice memo describing elephants in front of them, with a loud trumpet impression.
00:01 All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants
00:05 the cool thing about these guys is that they have really...
00:07 really really long trunks
00:12 and that's cool
00:14 ( baaaaaaaaaaahhh!!)
00:16 and that's pretty much all there is to say
What people transcribe
