Twelve Labs, the video search and understanding company, today announced that its new API Playground has entered private beta. The API Playground is a web platform that allows users to index and search videos without writing a single line of code. This space also doubles as an evaluation platform, where business users can define the “ground truth” of their video data and measure search performance without ever having to leave the Twelve Labs platform.

Six months ago, Twelve Labs introduced a first-of-its-kind suite of APIs that enable comprehensive video search in less than one second. The company’s proprietary video understanding system can locate exact moments almost instantly across massive video archives, and makes video search as fast and easy as CTRL-F. The API Playground is the next step towards mass adoption of video search, as now anyone can use the Twelve Labs system to index, search and share results within their organization.

“We aim to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to experience the benefits of video search,” said Jae Lee, CEO and co-founder of Twelve Labs. “With the API Playground, we reduce cycles for developers while strengthening visibility and communication between teams. Everyone can use the API Playground to understand how the technology works and can be applied to meet their specific needs. We believe this is the best approach for teams to evaluate our product and to advance broader adoption of video search.”

Twelve Labs’ API Playground was designed to answer three core questions for users:

  • What is the best way to display or provide a quality video search experience specific to my company? With the API Playground, users can try a variety of options to create exactly what they want before ever purchasing the product.
  • How will I know if the business folks on my team (non-developers) will be served by Twelve Labs’ platform without spending valuable time and multiple cycles getting something into their hands? Twelve Labs’ API Playground requires no coding so any member of the team can use video search for themselves. This frees up developers to work on the projects that move the needle for their business – including developing on the Twelve Labs platform, should they decide to become a customer.
  • What are the right metrics for evaluating the accuracy of search results? Twelve Labs knows that different elements of a video are important to companies for different reasons, thus impacting the perception of accuracy. The best way to evaluate the accuracy of search results for any given company is to test it on their own data. The API Playground makes this as fast, easy and efficient as possible so that companies will be blown away by results specific to their own data.

“Using Twelve Labs’ Playground continually amazes me as to what I can find in all parts of a video – be it the video itself, the conversation or text on screen – not only specific results but an understanding of the context of the query,” said Michael Phillips, co-founder and CPO at Source Digital. “With each new search, I discover new results and possibilities of the technology.”

How It Works

Any API Playground user can create an index and choose options, including Visual Search to analyze objects in the videos, Conversation to find specific snippets of speech and Text-in-Video to capture any letters or writing within the videos, as well as any combination of those options. Once the user’s videos are uploaded and indexed, a query can be run according to the specifications the user is looking for, alerting them to the closest matches based on the percentage of each option present. Users simply click on their selected video to view snippets that match their search.

Developers who want to test performance without having to code can also see the search queries and responses, as well as view the code and how it will look within the complete Twelve Labs platform.

“The API Playground provides a frictionless workflow that invites new users to easily experience intelligent video search while giving developers and business leaders all the data they need to make informed decisions about how the Twelve Labs product will be used and its value to the organization,” added Lee.

Users can sign up for the waitlist here. A public beta will be available later next year.