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Subject:Re: Transcribe Podcasts to text From:Kristof Van Tomme <kristof -at- pronovix -dot- com> To:Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> Date:Tue, 15 May 2012 14:53:03 +0200
cheers,
Kristof
***********
Sent from my phone
On May 15, 2012 1:05 PM, "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 May 2012 06:02:47 -0400, Phil Snow Leopard <
> philstokes03 -at- googlemail -dot- com> wrote:
>
> I'd be fascinated to know if there's anything that can do
>> [the transcription] very accurately.
>>
>
> In my own experience the best device is a technical writer who is a good
> typist. I was doing some work for a software dev fellow who wanted me to
> make written articles out of his training and promotional videos. Initially
> he planned that his receptionist, a good typist, would do the typing, while
> I would stick to rewriting the transcriptions into well-constructed
> articles.
>
> It turned out to be more effective for me to do it all. I can transcribe
> twenty minutes of technical material in about two or three hours, a rate
> that astonished me and my client. Two benefits resulted from this approach.
> (1) We avoided the introduction of errors, the kind in which a technical
> word or phrase is mis-transcribed into an incorrect meaning that is however
> spelled correctly. (2) My repeated viewing of the video itself gave me a
> better understanding of the material, so that I could later convey it
> effectively in print.
>
> I did not use anything to slow down the speech, but simply replayed each
> part over and over as needed. I even inserted time stamps every few minutes
> to make it easier to check the accuracy of the transcription.
>
> The opposite of this method can be performed either by software or by a
> poor typist. Both can handily generate almost-plausible nonsense. The
> silliest example I ever encountered was a story I heard from another tech
> writer who had to work from some "pre-transcribed" material taken from a
> recording dictated by a physicist. The typist had no comprehension of
> spoken mathematics. The physicist's words, "P sub s," which we might code
> in HTML as P<sub>s</sub>, were transmogrified into piece of ass.
>
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