Wouldn't it be great to have online meetings transcribed in real time?
NCTI has recently profiled the creator of CommuniClique, a simple and efficient communication and collaboration technology support. What's interesting? Teams can "hold meetings from their desktops face-to-face with audio and video, presenting all the communicative benefits of eye-contact, gestures, and voice intonation in real-time, as well as offering video quality that is robust enough for lip-reading." OK, but what else?
Well, here's where it gets interesting: It also offers closed-captioning. How? "The difference is we've structured our server farm to treat each person's voice as a separate channel. So we can actually take each person who is talking, separately and with no noise or overlap, take time stamps of when they say what, and transcribe each person's voice independently. Then we superimpose them back over each other just like you would see in an instant message transcript...A lot of our solutions aren't all that technically complex, they're just these, 'Why didn't I think of that' implementations'. We look for what makes sense, the simplest answer.' This was the case for the separate voice channel solution, which other companies had overlooked in trying to create transcription capability while attempting to solve logistical challenges with conversational overlap and confusion."
Click on http://www.nationaltechcenter.org/index.php/2009/07/20/ipro-communiclique/ to read more.