Communication
July 4, 2016
I’ve been invited to say ‘Hi!’ to single people in my area
Posted by quriosity under Business and Marketing, Communication | Tags: advertising, business, dating, humor, marriage, Match.com, singleness |Leave a Comment
Lately, Match.com has been sending me invitations to communicate with single people in my area.
The Internet is a wonderful thing. I receive so many lovely invitations. This one I think is unnecessary. I already know many single people and always make an effort to say hi to them. If they want to talk about it, I’m happy to let them know how much I enjoy being married. But maybe married life isn’t for everyone, so I don’t like to push it on them.
AB — 4 July 2016
July 29, 2014
Why I Didn’t Respond to Your Assertion
Posted by quriosity under Communication, Life, Politics, religion, Science, Society and Popular Culture, Thinking, World Affairs | Tags: argument, assertions, debate, extremism |Leave a Comment
Just for the record, often there’s so much wrong with an assertion that it’s hard to know where to start, so I just don’t bother. Just so you know.
— ARB, 29 July 2014
June 21, 2013
Using Speech Recognition to Automatically Transcribe Interviews, Meetings, and Speeches
Posted by quriosity under Business and Marketing, Communication, Human-Computer Interaction, Innovation, Language and Linguistics, Technology, Writing | Tags: audio, conferences, conversion, convert audio to text, interviewing, interviews, journalism, lectures, meetings, recording, speech recognition, talks, text, transcript, transcription, writing |[14] Comments
I’ve been looking for a way to use speech recognition to automate the transcription of interviews, meetings, speeches, conference presentations, and so on.
I spend a lot of time on the phone interviewing experts for the articles and reports I write. Normally I conduct the interview with a headset and do my best to type a transcript of what is said. I’m slow and a terrible typist, so my transcript misses a lot and comes out with many misspellings that are impossible to correct. Usually for an hour-long interview it takes me another hour to go through and fix mistakes, filling in gaps, and making guesses at uninterpretable words.
I would greatly benefit from a speech recognition solution that could create a fairly accurate transcript from audio, for example, live over the phone or from an mp3 file.
This need was emphasized to me even more this week, when I attended a conference and spent two days trying to take notes and capture useful quotes from speakers. I have a digital voice recorder and have all of the presentations in mp3 format, but it’s going to be quite a challenge to comb through all of that audio to find relevant quotes for the articles I will be writing about the conference. How much easier it would be it I had a software application that could convert all of those mp3s into fairly accurate text transcripts!
Unfortunately, it appears that voice recognition software is not ready to handle meetings and so on where multiple voices are involved. These systems have to be trained to recognized the voice of a single user.
I’m using this blog post to mark and share some possible solutions I have encountered. I will plan to add to this list as time goes — if and when the technology continues to improve.
+ Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance is supposed to be the best reasonably-priced speech recognition software for professional use. Nuance says Dragon is not able to transcribe multiple voices, but I’m tempted to shell out the $200 just to see what kind of results I might get with it. Suppose it were 50 percent accurate transcribing unfamiliar voices? That might be good enough for me.
+ Windows has its own built-in speech recognition capability. I plan to test this out to see whether I can make it work somehow. However, it’s hard to believe that Microsoft could come up with a better solution than a specialist company like Nuance.
+ One suggestion I’ve run into a lot is to transcribe a meeting or lecture by “parroting” or “re-speaking.” In other words, using speech rec software like Dragon, you listen to the recording of the meeting on headphones and repeat what you hear into your computer mic. Because Dragon is trained to your voice, it can create an automatic transcript. Sounds laborious, but it would probably be better that having to type it all out myself.
+ I also heard about a company called Koemei that has a cloud-based solution for converting video and audio assets into text. Looks as if this might work pretty well, however, their entry-level service is $149 per month. That sounds like a lot, but maybe someday…. For $20 per month I would definitely try it.
+ Another idea I have thought of is to call my Google Voice number and play the audio recording into my voicemail. Google Voice automatically transcribes my voicemails into text and often does an acceptable job — good enough so I could paste the results into a word processor and make quick corrections. I’m not sure yet if Google Voice can handle long audio streams, though. I’m thinking about testing this solution to see if I can make it work somehow.
+ Here’s an interesting video by Chaelaz showing how to use YouTube’s closed-captioning transcription service to convert audio to text. Looks as if you would have to create a video first and upload it to YouTube, but that’s an interesting possible work-around for what I’m trying to do.
ARB — 21 June 2013
May 24, 2013
A Collection of Famous Authors’ Hand-Drawn Outlines
Posted by quriosity under Communication, Creativity, Innovation, Writing | Tags: art, design, fiction, Joseph Heller, outlines, outlining, visual, writing |Leave a Comment
Emily Temple at Flavorwire has posted a useful assemblage of handwritten outlines by famous authors.
Here’s an example by Joseph Heller — click through to see it in full size:
ARB — 24 May 2013
April 2, 2013
Visualizing the World as 100 People
Posted by quriosity under Communication, Creativity, Economics, Health Care and Public Health, Infographics, World Affairs | Tags: demographics, global, housing, infographic, language, literacy, nutrition, population, poverty, statistics, water, world |Leave a Comment
Here’s a useful infographic for the demographics geeks among us.
According to this accounting, 15 out of the 100 are undernourished and one is starving. Thirteen have no safe water, 23 have no shelter.
Good to see that 83 are literate. Interesting that 22 can access a computer.
(Click the image to go to the original and explore it at full size.)
December 25, 2012
Why It’s Good to Pay Attention to Climate Change Misinformers
Posted by quriosity under Communication, Environment, Science, World Affairs | Tags: anti-science, carbon dioxide, climate change, CO2, communication, denialism, deniers, energy, environment, green, misinformation, Science, writing |Leave a Comment
I’ve heard a lot of people say that we shouldn’t listen to the “deniers” of man-made global warming, and that the media shouldn’t give them “equal time.” I’m going to step out of line and say I think it’s good to pay attention to the arguments of those who disagree with the consensus view on climate change.
My thinking on this issue has partly arisen while participating in a discussion in the “Green Group” on LinkedIn. (Not sure whether a non-member can view the group and its discussions.) I’m here repeating some of my comments from that discussion.
Science has it own motivation for improving its work, but I think the contrarians, the misinformers, and the misinformed provide added incentive to make the science better. They also add incentive for science communicators and journalists to do a better job communicating with the public about the science and its inferences.
Just a little example from my own work. I’ve heard many of the misinformed raise the objection, How can CO2 as a trace gas cause such a problem? And isn’t CO2 beneficial for plants? I remembered studying this in earth system science, but I didn’t really know how to make the case for it, and I couldn’t find any really accessible article to refer people to. So I did some investigation and wrote an article for it on my own column: “Carbon Dioxide — How Can One Little Molecule Be Such a Big Troublemaker?”
The point is that the misinformation gave me an incentive to do a better job of communicating.
ARB — 25 Dec 2012