5 ms·

> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a perso

by retrac 4y ago

> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.

lucb1e 4y ago
You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not sure, but if you're having trouble understanding, getting 80% as text plus your own hearing and lip reading might be a big aid.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.
    - kyriakos 4y ago
      That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people in our team are not native English speakers and it does a really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the meeting is pure comedy.
    - lucb1e 4y ago
      I'd love to hear a sample of a British accent where everything sounds like Samoa or similar! :D
      - HKH2 4y ago
        I guess it is meant to be 'somewhere'.
        OJFord 4y ago
        There honestly didn't seem to be any such rhyme or reason to it - it was way too frequent. Often replacing a whole sentence. (Not that those either side would be recognisable enough to see that it was a sentence between them being replaced.) The first time we saw it there was a good lot of 'what the hell is this' before we even realised it was supposed to be a transcript, it was that bad. I'm not talking about just the odd bits replaced with weird words/phrases - the whole thing would be utter nonsense. (And this was in Cambridge, not to say everybody was local (I'm not), but still, predominantly 'standard' not-straying-too-far-from-RP accents, it's not like it was some difficult niche regional accent & dialect that it couldn't understand.)
  - xxs 4y ago
    We use it as a joke internally. It requires plain English, spoken slowly with a generic US accent (even fake) - anything else is proper bad. To be fair it has improved nontrivially, though.
- IggleSniggle 4y ago
  Microsoft Teams also does this.
  - kiwijamo 4y ago
    Zoom has this also.
- extra88 4y ago
  As others have mentioned, Microsoft Teams also has an auto-generated Live Captions feature. It supports creating live captions for a number of spoken languages [0]. Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription [1]. While such features can be helpful, using them is rather different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a conversation. [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions... [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing-closed-captioning-and-live-transcription https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing...

by retrac 4y ago

lucb1e 4y ago

You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not sure, but if you're having trouble understanding, getting 80% as text plus your own hearing and lip reading might be a big aid.

kyriakos 4y ago
Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people in our team are not native English speakers and it does a really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the meeting is pure comedy.
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    I'd love to hear a sample of a British accent where everything sounds like Samoa or similar! :D
    - HKH2 4y ago
      I guess it is meant to be 'somewhere'.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        There honestly didn't seem to be any such rhyme or reason to it - it was way too frequent. Often replacing a whole sentence. (Not that those either side would be recognisable enough to see that it was a sentence between them being replaced.) The first time we saw it there was a good lot of 'what the hell is this' before we even realised it was supposed to be a transcript, it was that bad. I'm not talking about just the odd bits replaced with weird words/phrases - the whole thing would be utter nonsense. (And this was in Cambridge, not to say everybody was local (I'm not), but still, predominantly 'standard' not-straying-too-far-from-RP accents, it's not like it was some difficult niche regional accent & dialect that it couldn't understand.)
- xxs 4y ago
  We use it as a joke internally. It requires plain English, spoken slowly with a generic US accent (even fake) - anything else is proper bad. To be fair it has improved nontrivially, though.
IggleSniggle 4y ago
Microsoft Teams also does this.
- kiwijamo 4y ago
  Zoom has this also.
extra88 4y ago
As others have mentioned, Microsoft Teams also has an auto-generated Live Captions feature. It supports creating live captions for a number of spoken languages [0]. Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription [1]. While such features can be helpful, using them is rather different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a conversation. [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions... [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing-closed-captioning-and-live-transcription https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing...