Standard Operating Procedure: Video Transcription & Summarization Workflow

1. Purpose

This SOP defines the end-to-end workflow for accepting video assets, generating transcripts, producing summaries, and delivering outputs to stakeholders. It ensures consistent quality, predictable turnaround times, and clear accountability as the platform evolves.

2. Scope

• Applies to all environments (local development, staging, production) used to process customer video content.
• Covers manual and automated execution of the workflow, along with exception handling and quality checks.
• Excludes product feature prioritization, model research spikes, or vendor contract negotiations.

3. Roles and Responsibilities

• Product Owner (PO): Prioritizes intake requests, defines acceptance criteria, and signs off on release readiness.
• Operations Lead: Oversees daily processing queue, assigns operators, and approves reruns.
• Transcription Operator: Runs ingestion, monitors transcription jobs, and completes transcript QA.
• Summarization Operator: Tunes summary prompts/templates, validates outputs, and packages deliverables.
• Platform Engineer: Maintains infrastructure, resolves system incidents, and manages deployments.

4. Definitions

• Raw Video Asset: Original media file uploaded by customers or ingested from external sources.
• Processing Job: A unit of work that encapsulates transcription and summarization tasks for a single asset.
• Confidence Score: Numeric indicator returned by the speech-to-text engine showing transcript reliability.
• Delivery Package: Bundle of final artifacts (transcript, summaries, metadata) made available to consumers.

5. Prerequisites

• Valid credentials for storage, speech-to-text provider, and summarization LLM endpoints.
• Approved version of the platform infrastructure deployed and smoke-tested.
• Current prompt templates and summary formats stored under docs/prompts/ (create if absent).
• Access to monitoring dashboards and alerting channels (Slack #transcription-ops).
• Knowledge base links for vendor-specific quotas, rate limits, and maintenance windows.

6. Standard Workflow

1. Intake & Triage
   • Receive request via intake form or API.
   • Confirm media format, duration, language, and required turnaround.
   • Create or update a processing job record in the work tracker (e.g., Jira, Linear), tagging transcription and summary components.
2. Asset Staging
   • Upload or sync video to object storage bucket following naming convention: videos/{yyyy}/{mm}/{request-id}/source.ext.
   • Generate a checksum and log it in the job record.
   • Trigger antivirus/media validation if enabled. Quarantine and escalate on failure.
3. Transcription Execution
   • Submit audio to the configured speech-to-text engine with language and diarization options.
   • Monitor queue length and job status via dashboard; investigate any job exceeding SLA thresholds.
   • On completion, store transcript as Markdown or JSON under data/transcripts/{request-id}.json with metadata (timestamps, speaker tags, confidence scores).
4. Transcript Quality Assurance
   • Review flagged segments (confidence score < 0.85) and correct misheard phrases using source audio.
   • Validate speaker labeling, punctuation, and formatting.
   • Record QA results in the job record, noting any sections requiring follow-up.
5. Summarization Execution
   • Select summary templates (executive summary, bullet highlights, action items) based on request.
   • Run summarization service with transcript input; capture model parameters and prompt version in logs.
   • Store outputs under data/summaries/{request-id}/ with clear filenames (executive.md, bullets.md, etc.).
6. Summary Quality Assurance
   • Verify factual consistency against transcript; ensure no hallucinated names, dates, or figures.
   • Check tone and length meet acceptance criteria; adjust prompt or regenerate if needed.
   • Confirm redaction of sensitive data where required.
7. Delivery & Handoff
   • Compile delivery package (transcript, summaries, metadata report).
   • Notify stakeholders through the agreed channel (email, Slack, API callback) and attach delivery link.
   • Update job record to "Complete" with timestamps, processing duration, and final storage location.

7. Exception Handling

• Transcription Failure: Retry once with alternate engine parameters; escalate to Platform Engineer if second attempt fails.
• Low Confidence Transcript: Flag to Operations Lead; perform manual review or request customer clarification.
• Summarization Drift: Roll back to last known good prompt template and open a ticket for prompt tuning.
• Storage Outage: Pause new ingests, switch to secondary bucket if available, and follow incident protocol (Section 9).

8. Automation & Tooling Guidelines

• Maintain IaC definitions (e.g., Terraform) for storage buckets, queues, and compute resources.
• Version control prompt templates and summarization configurations alongside application code.
• Configure CI to run smoke tests for transcription and summarization services before deployment.
• Implement alerts for queue backlog, API error rates, and cost anomalies.

9. Incident Management

• Declare an incident if SLAs are at risk for more than 30 minutes or critical functionality is down.
• Platform Engineer initiates incident bridge and posts updates every 30 minutes.
• Record timeline, root cause, and remediation actions in the incident report template under docs/incidents/.
• After resolution, conduct a blameless postmortem and log follow-up tasks.

10. Change Management

• Proposals for workflow changes must include impact analysis, rollout plan, and rollback steps.
• Obtain sign-off from Product Owner and Platform Engineer prior to production changes.
• Update this SOP, related runbooks, and onboard training materials when changes ship.
• Communicate upcoming changes to operators at least 48 hours in advance.

11. Metrics & Continual Improvement

• Track turnaround time, transcript accuracy, summary satisfaction score, and incident rate.
• Review metrics in monthly ops retrospective; identify automation or training opportunities.
• Pilot improvements in staging before production adoption and document learnings.

12. Document Control

• Owner: Operations Lead
• Review Cadence: Quarterly or after major workflow update (whichever comes first)
• Revision History:

  Version	Date	Author	Notes
  0.1	2024-06-02	Operations Lead TBD	Initial draft covering intake-to-delivery workflow