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Obvious caveat that automatic transcriptions are not a replacement for manual transcriptions. They're better than nothing but the problem with mistakes in autom
by hnbad 6y ago
Obvious caveat that automatic transcriptions are not a replacement for manual transcriptions. They're better than nothing but the problem with mistakes in automated transcriptions is that they can entirely change the meaning of a statement in ways that are not necessarily obvious if you don't listen to the audio at the same time.
They also struggle with domain specific jargon depending on what data they were trained on. While manual transcriptions will mark ambiguous utterances as such (or ask for additional information), automation can create a false sense of certainty while just "guessing" whatever it matches most closely. This is a hard problem and unlikely to be solved soon.
- ghaff 6y agoI find they serve different use cases. ML transcriptions are fast/cheap and they're fine if you mostly want to pull out some quotes or check some things in your notes. But, in general, I find they're not remotely worth my time if I'm going to publish a transcript in which case I get a human transcription. (And even that can be a bit tough with accents, technical jargon, overlapping voices, etc.)
- hnbad 6y agoI would agree but given that automatic transcriptions are cheaper, many people treat it as an alternative when manual transcriptions would be more appropriate. Some tech conferences were pretty good about hiring actual people for live captioning, which was great, but with conferences mostly happening online via video streams at the moment, automated captions and transcriptions might seem like an obvious choice if you don't understand the limitations.