I did transcription for a while in 2021. It is absurdly hard. Especially as these days humans only get the difficult jobs that AI has already taken a stab at.
The hardest one I did was for a sports network where it was a motorcross motorbike event where most of what you could hear was the roar of the bikes. There were two commentators I had to transcribe over the top of that mess and they were using the slang insider nicknames for all the riders, not their published names, so I had to sit and Google forums to find the names of the riders while I was listening. I'm not even sure how these local models would even be able to handle that insanity at all because they almost certainly lack enough domain knowledge.
I was skepitcal upon hearing the figure but various sources do indeed back it up and [0] is a pretty interesting paper (old but still relevant human transcibers haven't changed in accuracy).
qingcharles|25 days ago
The hardest one I did was for a sports network where it was a motorcross motorbike event where most of what you could hear was the roar of the bikes. There were two commentators I had to transcribe over the top of that mess and they were using the slang insider nicknames for all the riders, not their published names, so I had to sit and Google forums to find the names of the riders while I was listening. I'm not even sure how these local models would even be able to handle that insanity at all because they almost certainly lack enough domain knowledge.
XCSme|25 days ago
zipy124|25 days ago
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
rhdunn|25 days ago
- familiarity with the accent and/or speaker;
- speed and style/cadence of the speech;
- any other audio that is happening that can muffle or distort the audio;
- etc.
It can also take multiple passes to get a decent transcription.
Nimitz14|25 days ago