I tagged a few sections earlier in the conversation with our names, and Otter Voice Notes scanned and assigned the tags for the rest of the conversation. In the above excerpt, I did not explicitly tag the sections spoken by me or Oberon. What OVN does fairly well is identify the different speakers. And there are the occasional wrong guesses (Oberon said “Let me see now” not “Let me see how you know”.)

There’s no mechanism, at least in the web interface, for training OVN to learn new words. I have yet to see OVN correctly interpret “Gardnerian”, “Druidry”, or “Phaedra”. For example, there is no way Otter Voice Notes could have correctly interpreted the name Carl Weschcke or the name of the publication Gnostica. There are some issues that are both inevitable and unavoidable.

(The person we’re discussing is Ron Wright, whom I interviewed a few months later.) Here’s a small excerpt from an interview I did with Oberon Zell-Ravenheart back in 2011: The software does a reasonable job given what I provide as input. It can transcribe an interview “live”, which I have not tried, or work with previously-recorded audio files.Īs a transcription service, the results from Otter Voice Notes are far from perfect on the other hand, my audio recordings are further from perfect. Otter Voice Notes is a program for both Android and iOS devices, and can be run in a web browser for desktop systems. It looks like my hopes have been realized. I hoped that the technology for transcribing interviews would emerge. I didn’t really need the transcriptions right away, since there was so much other organizing, scanning, and research to do, so I let the problem slide. I knew I could never afford the cost of having the material professionally transcribed. There have been speech-to-text systems around for quite a few years, but they weren’t set up to handle multiple speakers. (I have to contact Joan Carruth, Carolyn Clark, and the members of Real Magic someday.) I have about 70 hours worth of interviews so far, with still a few more to go. One big issue with my research was transcribing interviews. I periodically scan more documents from the last boxes of papers Phaedra sent me.

I’m still working on the biography of Isaac Bonewits, though I admit my progress has been slow.

Ottervoice