Transcribing your Digital Meeting or Conference

These are the days of abundant digital ‘conferences’. Each conversation can be socialised. Instead of meeting in person and sharing a picture together, one is sharing the conversation. In addition, conference formats are being reimagined.

Work meetings have gone digital. We are all on the same platform. Plus there can be distractions too.

We are getting tempted to attend digital conferences and meetings to learn, interact, collaborate and essentially socialise. Your digital calendar may have more meeting hours than actual hours in a day. So choices seem to get made or perhaps one feels the fatigue too. There are enough articles on that too.

With digital meetings you have the option of transcription. In effect, everything that is said in the meeting is automatically converted into text. Text that you can read, annotate and have notes for. Microsoft Teams provides for an admin option to allow transcription. Once activated, this is available to everyone within the organisation.

Zoom has been quickly adopted for meetings, learning sessions and more. You can record the zoom recording and import it into Descript. If you opted to record separate tracks for each person then you would get a pretty good multi-track transcription. You can follow most of the steps for other services like Skype and more.

Companies using one of Zoom’s Business or Enterprise plans can also add an automatic transcription via Otter for Teams.

I have used both Otter and Descript for other workflows and they have been a handy timesaver. They are reasonably effective but when a person switches to another language eg hindi, there might be glitches and you would need to make those corrections. But overall they are fairly good. You can judge efficacy by trying one of their basic or free products.

If your organisation uses Google Meet, then perhaps you can explore Tactiq. https://tactiq.io/

In conclusion, You can now work on the important document or spend time doing something else, even as your favourite digital meeting tool records the conference you signed up for. And yes you will have the notes from that conference.