Microsoft Garage Group Transcribe Tries To Make Meeting Notes Obsolete
AI-powered transcription services have been around for quite some time now but the transition to online meetings of late have almost made them less useful. More and more businesses, however, are moving back to in-person meetings but with safeguards in place, like masks and physical distancing. That can make automatic transcription harder, forcing some to take notes and lose the flow of the conversation. Microsoft Garage's latest project, however, tries to address that with seemingly magical AI, as long as everyone in the meeting has an iPhone and the Group Transcribe app installed.
To be clear, Group Transcribe is designed for in-person meetings, not for online ones. While it can still be used for remote or virtual meetings, its efficacy could drop considerably. That's because the app harnesses the collective audio input of all phones connected in a meeting to create a "highly accurate transcript" that also includes who said what.
This "live" requirement also powers Group Transcribe's real-time translation capabilities. That means that participants can speak comfortably in their own languages and others will be able to follow along with a live translated transcript. Group Transcribe supports more than 80 languages, Microsoft Garage boasts, but its seemingly magical power doesn't come without its costs.
Like any AI-based transcription and translation system, Group Transcribe improves and grows according to the data it is fed. While Microsoft promises it doesn't store audio recordings or transcribed text on its servers, the Garage research team is appealing to users to donate some of that data to help improve the system. It's an opt-in condition, thankfully, and requires all participants to actually agree to the donation.
Recordings and transcripts will be "de-identified" and split up into snippets that will then be distributed to reviewers. That said, Microsoft Garage does make it clear that humans will actually be involved in processing those snippets, perhaps bringing back the nightmares around smart voice assistants and third-party contractors a few years back.