The Echo in the Machine
radiolab.org
radiolab.org
Before health issues stalled her career, my wife got licensed to be a court reporter. It's a fascinating discipline and its top tier practicioners will certainly outperform AI as long as humans still have any kind of edge on computers anywhere. For business purposes, "good enough" automatic transcription is going to steamroll the market for these services, though.
Feels like a strange echo of the industrial revolution, the world suddenly flooded with mass-produced things.
This is an audio story about the invention of closed caption systems. A few parts that I found fascinating:
> MEREDITH PATTERSON: But by the beginning of 2003, it was becoming apparent that not enough steno writers were available to match the growing amount of content that needed to be captioned...: I was very junior, and maybe that's why I was tasked with experimenting with some software that we called the "black box."
> SIMON: Little things like the news broadcaster throwing to the weatherman would totally trip it up. It didn't include punctuation. And accents of any kind were an issue. However, what it could do pretty darn well was transcribe her voice, which led to a sort of crazy idea...What if she just echoed every word said on television into the computer? Maybe she could close caption that way.
I was also surprised that through 2020, the national captioning center was fully staffed by humans and growing. And only recently have they begun replacing humans through attrition with AI:
> SIMON: ... that technology they had started playing around with back in the early 2000s, just, like, the black box, AI running the feed directly into the computer, it works pretty damn well. It works well enough that you basically no longer need a human in the system at all. Meaning this dance? It's winding down, it's coming to an end. Today, Meredith says AI is doing around 50 percent of the closed captioning the National Captioning Institute is hired to do.