I recently read an article about the advancement of transcription technology. Sam Liang, chief executive and co-founder of otter-ai, missed his mom and wanted to capture her essence. Imagine if someone told you that your entire life’s speech conversation could be captured and put on a device worth about fifty dollars. This is possible through data compression. His longing for his mom led him to work towards improving speech recognition technology. Improvements in speech recognition technology have made programs such as Siri and Alexa more popular. As the programs become more advanced, this raises the question about privacy with devices. Companies are thinking about monitoring their workers’ conversations in the workplace. At what point is this an invasion of privacy? Also, devices such as these use data collected for other uses. I am weary of a computer having all of my data, but it is inevitable nowadays because of all the technology around us.
A less scary benefit of speech recognition programs is for hearing impaired people. This makes it easier to attend lectures and speeches. Companies are also using the programs to transcribe business meeting and then have easy access to the whole meeting at their fingertips. Transcription services have also become cheaper because of popularity and rival companies. This allows transcription services to be used in multiple forms of media. For example, it is used for video conferencing programs such as Zoom and programs such as YouTube. Another use is in the medical field. Many medical companies have electronic health records in order for medical personnel to seem more attentive to the patient. A company, Robin Healthcare, offers automated transcription and then a human edits the text.
I think the benefits of transcription services are great. However, I think they must be used carefully. I do not want every single conversation I have ever had recorded. I would be hesitant to say anything ever in case it could be used against me in the future. The use of this technology could have new legal implications about privacy rights. Speech recognition programs are improving greatly and the goal in the future is to be able to develop a type of speech recognition technology called neutral language process. This is getting the computer to be able to have more human accuracy. This goes to show how much technology is moving towards more artificial intelligence.
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