Otter.ai

Having served at the MOE HQ for almost 10 months, minutes taking is becoming a norm. This means that as staffers we have to note down all that has been said or discussed at a meeting verbatim (word for word) before possibly spending some time to sense-make and prepare if for vetting in the NoMs. Thanks to technology and especially because of the shift from physical meetings to online meetings, tools like Otter.ai really help as it taps on the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Natual Language Processing (NLP) to record and change the words captured and interpreted into text. In the realm of speech-to-text technology this definitely is quite advanced.

the logo

The good thing about the platform is that it is free for low level use and there's 600 minute of recording offered every month (resets monthly). The programme is able to detect when there is a change of speakers and there are some other additional affordances if one is willing to pay. For now, the transcription is far from perfect at least based on the conversations and discussions in the meetings that I have sat in but at least the platform offers to capture the live audio and show the trascribed words in real time. I can imagine that the service will get better in time as the words are corrected despite the imperfect pronunciation of the speakers.

I know that word document software also have some of this capabilities. So perhaps, someday Google Docs' voice typing capabilities can be as good as this and then the transcribing can be faster real time with live collaborative capabilities. Till then, I will continue to explore such productivity tools to become more efficient at my job.