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I know some of you may be sick of "wow, look at this cool thing AI can do, how eerie is that?" posts, but I can't help but be blown away by some of the applications of this technology.
I play in a band, and we upload our music to streaming platforms using a company called DistroKid. When you're uploading music, they strongly encourage you to submit the lyrics for the song at the same time for SEO reasons (and so that the lyrics will appear onscreen if someone shares the song on Instagram). It's a little textbox where you paste your lyrics in, then you're done.
I went to upload a song today, and found that they've added a new feature. After uploading the audio file, you can get an AI to try to transcribe the lyrics rather than typing them out manually.
It nailed it. The song is 215 words long, and the AI only made about 6 mistakes i.e. 97% accuracy. For reference, this is a noisy post-hardcore song with layers of shoegazey guitars, feedback and pounding drums. What's more, it achieved this 97% accuracy in a matter of seconds, maybe 5% of the total runtime of the song itself.
A few years ago I used a voice transcription service called Happy Scribe, which achieved comparable levels of accuracy - but only for plain speech recorded in a quiet environment with no background ambiance. If you record speech without a directional mic in an environment with a lot of background noise (e.g. a café), Happy Scribe was pretty much useless and I had to transcribe everything the old-fashioned way.
But now AI can transcribe words near-perfectly from lyrics with a musical accompaniment? That's insanity. I can't imagine how anyone will be able to find work as a transcriber for any major language a year from now.
More than songs, I just want podcasts to be transcribed, as a rule. I'm far more into reading (and writing, why else would I even write here?) stuff than listening to it, even listening to it at 1.5x speed or whatever, especially when it comes to English. Sure, there are podcast transcription services, but they require me to download them and then plonk them to the program one at a time for transcription, and the results are still so-so.
Have you tried AssemblyAI? They have a sandbox that can transcribe podcasts for you.
https://www.assemblyai.com/playground/source
That's pretty good, thanks!
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