Hacker News Reader

Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

I've transcribed calls with Microsoft Teams and 8x8 and the transcripts are absolutely awful. Sometimes so poor that one cannot reliably use them with LLMs. I feel so incredibly left out when I see these models on HN and have to go back to corporate reality and deal with Microsoft Teams and 8x8. I wish these products could produce plugins where i could direct Microsoft Teams and 8x8 streams to them to replace underperforming stock models.

Also, I dont understand why Microsoft cannot just buy some of these upstarts and swap in their awesome models.

View on HN

When I hear Microsofties talk about how AI coding agents are not very good I have to remind myself they’re using copilot

I despair every time Copilot offers to do something then, in the next turn, reveals it cannot actually do the thing. Thankfully, this isn’t my only exposure to LLMs otherwise I’d probably write them all off.

I once alerted our admins because the voicemail of my boss got auto-transcribed so badly that it read like a horribly written spam mail sent from her email address.

It mixed French, English, Japanese and Hindi in maybe 3 lines of text and the French and English parts had a subtle erotic touch to them

Probably because they dont give a fuck right? Is your corpo gonna dump teams? Doubt it

If Microsoft bought them they would just turn into a Microsoft product and wouldn't be useful anymore. GitHub, Nokia, Skype?

The real question to ask is why must we after 40 years of being subject to that horrible company still suffer it's existence upon the face of the earth? Corporate corruption? I have no clue honestly but I wish I could give you a hug for having to deal with it.

I'll take virtual hugs any time.

Dealing with this IRL, here is my thought

- When you step into a tech leadership role, you inherit a bunch of contracts, e.g. with Microsoft.

- The contracts are really a set of a dozen or two dozen contracts, often 1 or 2 or 3yrs long, overlapping expirations so there is never any opportunity for a clean cut

- You are faced with either a clean break where you lose millions as you double-pay, or you just accept poor products as a necessary part of the job

- Between Entra and Dataverse and everything else, the whole system is a poorly documented bowl of spaghetti.

When it comes to Teams, it doesn’t need to be a plugin - plenty of good transcribers/notetakers simply join like another participant.

> I wish these products could produce plugins where i could direct Microsoft Teams

Producing the plugin is easy. It’s getting your corporate IT to approve the connection (and potentially legal + data governance). Especially if you work with sensitive data (either your company in general or your role/team specifically)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com