Dev-Audio has partnered with an emerging speech recognition start-up company, Koemei, to offer a free beta trial of their fully automatic meeting transcription to customers of Microcone Recorder. This service is currently available for English language meetings only.

There are a number of services available these days that provide speech transcription over the internet. Many of these are simply designed as interfaces to improve the process of dispatching audio recordings to be manually transcribed by someone - allowing a transcription agency to offer their services to a broader geography. Some services are semi-automated, using speech recognition technology to improve efficiency, but in the end someone listens to the audio and manually edits the transcript.

Koemei is one of the few truly automated transcription services: the audio recording is processed from beginning to end by the Koemei software, meaning that no-one ever hears your recordings. As soon as the transcription is completed, Koemei removes all trace of your audio files from its servers, further protecting your privacy.

The Koemei technology differs from other commercial speech recognition systems in several important ways. First, it has been designed specifically to cater for the type of speech encountered in group conversations. Second, rather than requiring a laborious voice training phase like several other software systems, it automatically adapts to the voices in each recording. Finally, acknowledging the reality of global business, it has been designed to cater for “international” English by speakers with a variety of accents.

Integration with Microcone Recorder means that you simply hit a button to have your meetings uploaded to Koemei, and a short time later your meeting transcription appears. This full automation brings a number of benefits. Firstly, peace of mind that no person has listened to your audio recordings. Secondly, fast turnaround - you can generally expect to have the transcript from a typical half hour meeting available one hour later. Finally, with an automatic transcription it becomes less critical to take copious notes during a meeting, knowing that you can quickly search back through the recording.

There are significant benefits to automatic transcription, however there is a limitation to bear in mind: while Koemei provides the current state-of-the-art performance in automatic transcription, machines still can’t match the accuracy of an experienced human transcriptionist. Whether it is being done by a person or a machine, recognising speech in group meetings is a significantly more complex task than single voice dictation due to a range of factors. This means that a reasonable expectation is that a fully automated transcription will be 70%-80% correct at a word level, on average. While not sufficiently accurate for use as an authoritative legal record of what was said in a meeting, an automatic transcript is however a powerful tool for searching through a database of meetings to find the key sound bite you want to review.

Recognising that there are both benefits and limitations of automatic speech transcription, Microcone Recorder has been designed to give users the choice:

• If you want the convenience to be able to search through your meeting recordings, integration with Koemei provides fully automatic transcription at the touch of a button.

• If your accuracy requirements are more stringent, Microcone Recorder includes features that can streamline a transcriptionist’s process: automatic separation of voices, automatic labelling of voice activity, the ability to loop audio over a particular speech segment, and the ability to adjust the playback speed. For larger corporate clients, we offer a customisation service to integrate Microcone Recorder with your transcription service of choice.

• And for something in between, you can always get the automatic transcription and progressively improve it over time by correcting any errors as you notice them. In this sense, the automatic transcription provides a tool to speed up the process of obtaining a manual transcription.

Dev-Audio has obtained early access to the Koemei beta service as a free trial for Microcone Recorder customers. This trial is expected to run until early 2011, when Koemei releases its full-featured commercial systems tailored to different professional domains and deployment scenarios. Over the course of the beta trial, the service will improve in terms of speed and accuracy as Koemei develops its system - because it is delivered as a web service, users will automatically benefit from these improvements.

The Koemei beta trial is enabled in Microcone Recorder, now available in our online shop.