I was at a conference yesterday where they had live transcription of the speakers onto big screens by the stage. On this occasion it was a human stenographer i

I was at a conference yesterday where they had live transcription of the speakers onto big screens by the stage. On this occasion it was a human stenographer in the back-end, but what was remarkable from is that if you didn't already know that, you'd guess from the error rate (not perfect, with difficulties that made sense in context) and the delay (bounced to another continent and back) that it was something like Whisper running locally. All the more so if you happened to know that one of the organisers has been running local AI meetups. It seems to me like the only way up from here, now, is to aim for better than the average human stenographer. You'd have to have a system capable of reasoning "ah, what I heard was Y but they must have really meant X" when X involves knowledge that couldn't possibly be predicted from the context, like a foreign name coming up for the first time. I can believe that if the stenographer had more domain-specific knowledge that they wouldn't have made some of the errors they did, but we're already off into capabilities that are as good as an extremely rare type of human today.