CNET: Record and transcribe your Zoom meetings with this new tool, here’s how. “Zoom calls are a part of daily life for many professionals and as companies examine hybrid workplace models, that’s not likely to change anytime soon. A new tool from note-taking app Otter.ai aims to help you keep track of what happens during your Zoom meetings by automatically recording and transcribing notes so you don’t have to.”
University of Michigan: New crowdsourced project to digitize Michigan lake and fish records, looking for climate trends. “University of Michigan researchers will enlist the help of citizen scientists in a new project to digitize thousands of historical records—some dating back more than a century—about Michigan inland lake conditions and fish abundances. Scientists will feed the digitized data into computer models to study the impacts of climate change and other factors on the fish in Michigan’s inland lakes.”
TechCrunch: Dan Siroker’s new startup Scribe automates Zoom note-taking. “Scribe appears in the meeting as an additional participant, recording video and audio while creating a real-time transcript. During or after the meeting, users can edit the transcript, watch or listen to the associated moment in the recording and highlight important points. From a technological perspective, none of this feels like a huge breakthrough, but I was impressed by the seamlessness of the experience — just by adding an additional participant, I had a full recording and searchable transcript of our conversation that I could consult later, including while I was writing this story.”
Google Blog: Using AI to explore the future of news audio. “KQED is the most listened to public radio station in the United States, and one of the largest news organizations in the Bay Area. In partnership with Google, KQED and KUNGFU.AI, an AI services provider and leader in applied machine learning, ran a series of tests on KQED’s audio to determine how we might reduce the errors and time to publish our news audio transcripts, and ultimately, make radio news audio more findable.”
CTV News: ‘Witchcraft’: NAIT student making stenography cool with social media videos. “Videos of a NAIT student reporting about what she’s learning in her court reporter classes are turning her into a social media sensation. Isabelle Lumsden’s videos about stenography have been seen over 2.5 million times on TikTok.”
CNET: Otter can now transcribe your Google Meet chats in real time. “Transcription service Otter has launched a Chrome extension that will allow groups of co-workers to keep automatic notes on meetings through Google Chat. Otter already offers a similar service for Zoom. Google Chat already has a live captioning feature, but Otter’s big draw is its editable transcript that the whole team can access and alter during and after the meeting, making it a more flexible collaborative tool.”
DigitalNC: DigitalNC from Home: Oral History Transcription. “Transcriptions are the written text of audio files, which are, in our case, recordings of oral histories. The oral histories on DigitalNC vary in length, ranging from two minutes, to two hours, and beyond. Typing out transcriptions from scratch takes time- a lot of time. To help us out, we use the transcription software, Sonix. Once an audio file has been uploaded to Sonix, the software ‘listens’ to and creates text of what it heard.”
DigitalNC: DigitalNC Works from Home: Closed Captions. “While at home, the NCDHC staff has been working on increasing accessibility to users through the addition of closed captions. Closed captions provide audiences with the text version of what is being spoken as well as relevant sound information–such as music, applause, and laughter–written out and synchronized with the audio of the video. Unlike open captions that are always present on a video, closed captions can be turned on and off by the viewer. The use of captions is not limited to those who have difficulty hearing, but encompass a large percent of the population who use them for diverse reasons which include helping people to focus, retain information, being in a sound-sensitive environment (e.g. a library), and more.”
Asahi Shimbun: Multi-database search system for old kanji a 1st for researchers. “Archaic forms of kanji that are difficult to decipher in the modern age are being compiled into an online image retrieval system so scholars and others can gain a better grasp of what people were writing about in bygone times. Six research institutes were involved in developing the Multi-Database Search System for Historical Chinese Characters, the first of its kind that collates old kanji from various regions and periods in history.”
Silicon Republic: Live video captioning now available on Zoom through new tool. “Otter.ai uses AI to produce transcriptions in real time that combine audio transcription, speaker identification, inline photos and key phrases. Now, this ability has been added to Zoom, with real-time captioning now available on video calls and webinars for Otter for Business and Zoom Pro subscribers or higher.”
TechCrunch: Luther.AI is a new AI tool that acts like Google for personal conversations. “When it comes to pop culture, a company executive or history questions, most of us use Google as a memory crutch to recall information we can’t always keep in our heads, but Google can’t help you remember the name of your client’s spouse or the great idea you came up with at a meeting the other day. Enter Luther.AI, which purports to be Google for your memory by capturing and transcribing audio recordings, while using AI to deliver the right information from your virtual memory bank in the moment of another online conversation or via search.” Putting the privacy issues aside, this could make married couple fights positively incendiary.
The Next Web: How to use Microsoft Word’s new ‘Transcribe’ tool. “Microsoft today announced a new feature for Word: a transcription tool that allows you to get spoken words into your document without you having to type all of them. We’ll show you how to use it.”
The Guardian: Could you help with the archive’s shorthand transcription project?. “We have digitised a set of notebooks from our Clyde Sanger archive. Sanger worked as a Guardian journalist in the mid-20th century, starting as the paper’s first Africa correspondent and going on to serve as UN correspondent and Canada correspondent. His notes are written in a mixture of longhand and Pitman’s New Era shorthand, and we’re looking for volunteers able to read the shorthand and willing to try transcribing it from the digital scans.”
Times of Israel: You can help Nazi victims’ families learn their fates in online archive project. “A huge crowdsourcing project to memorialize the victims of Nazi persecution is bringing together thousands of volunteers from across the globe who are locked down during the international coronavirus crisis. The ‘Every Name Counts’ project, based out of Germany’s Arolsen Archives (formerly the International Tracing Service), aims to make 26 million recently digitized primary historical records searchable.”
