Microsoft Teams goes automatic with transcription
Whether in the medical field or in the professional environment, the future of transcription is quickly expanding. At Authôt, we are specialists in Speech to Text technology, from which we bring you optimal automatic transcriptions in all sectors. After our online automatic transcription platform Authôt APP, we launched Authôt Live. This is a live transcription and translation service! Today, several video-conferencing software packages are also starting to offer transcription options. That is, to be able to directly obtain the written rendering of oral exchanges made via a platform. Thus, Microsoft is one of the American giants to start using automatic transcription via Microsoft Teams. Why should Microsoft use automatic transcription? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this new functionality for Teams? That’s what we’ll look at together here.
State of play on automatic transcription
First of all, in order to understand the interest of using automatic transcription for a video conferencing tool such as Microsoft Teams, let’s go back over what transcription is. In fact, transcription is a specific action of « copying », of transforming an oral speech into a written form. Transcription is the process and transcribing is the final output.
Whereas in the past, transcription was strictly manual and tedious, today tools make it possible to facilitate the process and save time for humans by doing it automatically. Automatic transcription is itself made possible by speech recognition – or automatic speech recognition.
This technology, which relies on artificial intelligence and computer systems, analyses the human voice in the form of sound signals and then transcribes it into text. It is a real transformation of content since from an audio file, we obtain a text file… And it is very practical!
As bestoutils.com points out, until very recently, « to transcribe an audio or video file reliably, it was better to go through a professional […] things have changed a lot. Automatic transcription systems have evolved and improved a lot ».
At Authôt, we have firmly believed since 2012 in the ability to make all multimedia content accessible to everyone… And when you know that it takes 7 hours of manual work to transcribe 1 hour of audio text, that’s a lot! That’s why we are working in this direction thanks to our Authôt APP platform, which is 95% reliable for good audio files. In addition, our professional proofreading service makes it easy to fill in the remaining 5% and obtain optimal transcriptions!
Microsoft is also getting into transcription
This news comes from siecledigital.co.uk, Microsoft has just introduced live transcription into its video conferencing software, Teams. Indeed, from now on, « meetings can be transcribed live from Microsoft Teams ».
In fact, with the massive use of videoconferencing tools in the remote work era, more and more features are being integrated directly into these platforms. Indeed, in order for all these meetings, these various oral and video exchanges not to remain in vain, to keep a trace, the intervention of transcription is essential. Therefore, with just a few clicks, it is now possible to access written content. Files that can be easily « saved » and shared remotely.
For Microsoft Teams, the live transcription functionality became available on 23 March 2021.
Based on a system driven by artificial intelligence, it identifies each speaker and transcribes their words live. It literally transforms audio into writing. It does signal conversion. While chatting, users can also follow all the writings live via a side panel.
And, of course, because the file is generated live, it is even faster to retrieve it after the video conference. This written file will be very useful for remembering the key points of the meeting, for sharing it with other colleagues who were not present, for creating internal and external communication documents…
Live transcription is a challenge for Microsoft Teams
However, for Teams, this functionality is currently only available for scheduled English meetings… Furthermore, users must have the E3, E5, Business or Standard version of Microsoft 365 to access it.
As Shalendra Chhabra, head of conversational AI for Microsoft Teams rightly illustrates, providing « live transcription with high accuracy, minimal latency and cost-effectiveness at enterprise scale has been one of the most difficult challenges in the industry ».
This is a field where there is still a lot of progress to be made, for those companies that are starting out, who have less experience than us in this area!
Indeed, this requires advanced developments for artificial intelligence, time for them to train, learn and improve.
As clubic.com points out, it’s official, it will have « finally required a little more time before seeing the light of day, but this functionality is definitely there. However, in France we will have to be patient before we can enjoy it.
If Microsoft has been able to make this feature available in a convincing form, it is thanks to the improvement of its AI. An artificial intelligence that literally serves transcription. However, as you can see, it still has its limitations. Indeed, to access the transcription of their meetings, administrators must activate it beforehand, launch this function at the beginning of the event – and only for certain meetings…
Authôt: your solution for transcribing and subtitling your videoconference exchanges
Authôt is your solution for transcribing and subtitling your video conference exchanges live. Indeed, after having shown you how to use Authôt Live with tools such as Zoom and Facebook, we have gone further. This tool, which is very effective for transcribing your conferences, courses and online debates live, is accessible to everyone. All you need is an account and/or an invitation.
It’s easy to use and you can launch it from anywhere! In addition, you can also subtitle live content – something that Microsoft Teams does not yet offer!
All in all, Microsoft Teams is getting into automatic transcription, which is good news for English speakers! For French speakers, don’t hesitate to opt for our live transcription solution Authôt Live!
Authôt. You speak. We write.