[HN Gopher] Otter.ai has saved reporters hours transcribing inte...
___________________________________________________________________
Otter.ai has saved reporters hours transcribing interviews. Caveat
emptor
Author : danso
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-02-17 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.com)
| jdlshore wrote:
| The article raises a good point, but in a hamfisted and
| clickbaity way.
|
| The underlying story is that there is no story: the author
| recorded a sensitive conversation and sent it to Otter. Otter
| sent him a survey in response and referenced the title of the
| recording. The author grew concerned that his recordings had been
| shared with China. Otter scrambled to respond, and eventually
| reassured the author that his recordings had never been shared
| with any foreign governments or law enforcement agencies.
|
| The underlying point, that using transcription services puts
| journalists' sources at risk, is well taken. But the story
| unfairly tries to make it sound like Otter has a problem, when
| the author is really just using Otter as a vehicle for their
| story.
| [deleted]
| bigcat123 wrote:
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think the article is extremely interesting: As I kept
| reading, it eventually dawned on me that what had disturbed the
| author and gotten their attention at all was really just that a
| customer survey used the same title they had used when saving
| the interview recording file. The title was the name of their
| informant, and I think they were shocked Otter played an
| informant's name back at them.
|
| It seems like they never before considered the implications of
| using the service and sending interview contents off-device at
| all.
|
| If this is representative of the trade, I think as tech we have
| a lot of education left to do for everyone's safety. And if it
| is, good on the author for making it transparent. I feel like
| they learned a lot researching the article and basically put
| their own inadequacies on display for public scrutiny, which
| many others may not do.
|
| Consider this next time you update your company's Privacy
| Policy and wonder if it's understandable, to who, can be
| discovered at all, etc. Do your users understand what of their
| data you have and how you use it?
| danShumway wrote:
| The story is that the author hadn't considered this, and
| there's a lot of different ways we could dig into that:
|
| - the general quality of education we're giving journalists
| about privacy and security.
|
| - whether or not Otter.ai (and other tech services in
| general) have a responsibility to turn away journalists that
| they think might be putting other people in danger by using
| the services.
|
| - whether we in the tech industry are being irresponsible by
| just constantly assuring the public that AI-driven services
| don't involve interaction with human employees/contractors.
|
| - whether we should have a set of general, open standards for
| how journalists conduct interviews that will help avoid
| problems like this.
|
| - if you're being interviewed by a journalist about something
| sensitive, should you inquire into what their setup is, and
| should you explicitly make requests like asking them to
| promise not to use a 3rd-party for processing the interview.
|
| And so on. I couldn't agree more, I don't think it's a non-
| story, I think it's a very important story. Otter.ai is a
| small part of it though, and the story is more about the
| context/environment that causes a story like this to be
| written and that causes this to be news.
|
| ----
|
| > And if it is, good on the author for making it transparent
|
| That's also a good point; part of the way you change
| journalist attitudes towards data security is you get
| journalists to research it and then talk to each other and
| very transparently say, "hey, these things we thought were
| safe aren't, and we are making mistakes with data right now."
| It's a lot more powerful and effective for a journalist to
| say that about themselves and about their field than for us
| to criticize them for bringing the issue up -- even if it
| feels at points in the article like the author hasn't really
| grasped all of the problems with what they're doing yet.
| gowld wrote:
| This is why AI should be on-device.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Sure. But it's not a crime to build a service that isn't
| fit for use with every type of data. I think it's OK if I
| build a service you upload some data to and that does some
| processing, as long as I make sure you understand what data
| I get and what I can do with it, so you can decide what
| data you don't want to give me (or the people who buy me
| out, or the people who can subpoena me).
|
| And I think creating (or mandating) that transparency is
| probably a precept for offering an alternative product that
| runs on-device and doesn't have the same trust limitations
| - because the value prop has to be understood to make it a
| business. This article may inadvertently bring about a
| market for " _safe_ translation app for journalists ". We
| need the public to start thinking in these categories if we
| want a product landscape with both.
| 0898 wrote:
| "Scrambled to respond" is rather generous, I'd say.
|
| It took Otter.ai three months to confirm the email was genuine
| - having initially said that it wasn't.
| toyg wrote:
| No, having said it _was_ and then shortly after that it _wasn
| 't_, and then eventually after 3 months that indeed it was.
|
| It feels like, after the first candid response, somebody
| higher up went "oops, this looks bad, deny everything!", and
| eventually retracted it because the guy wouldn't give up.
|
| Looks like the sort of misunderstanding that Pied Piper might
| find themselves into, to be charitable.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| What are my options for something like this that runs entirely in
| my machine?
| aaron695 wrote:
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I use Otter pretty religiously to record all work meetings that I
| participate in. That is probably overkill, but it is great to be
| able to go back and find details about something I didn't take
| notes on or wanted to review.
|
| I work with a geographically distributed team and it doesn't do
| an amazing job with English in various accents -- I've noticed
| Google Recorder on Android is better in this regard -- but it's
| good enough.
|
| Nice product.
| octodog wrote:
| Do your colleagues know that they are being recorded?
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Obviously, a lot of companies prefer to host enterprise software
| on-prem rather than allow them to run in the cloud.
|
| Is anyone aware if there's been a similar movement to create on-
| prem versions of popular ML-based products? Otter, Grammarly,
| etc.
| hs86 wrote:
| If you are looking for a self-hosted Grammarly alternative,
| LanguageTool [0] might be for you.
|
| I use LTeX [1] for VSCode, which sets up a local LanguageTool
| server, and its resource usage is quite significant. (I use it
| together with their n-gram data sets [2])
|
| [0] https://dev.languagetool.org/
|
| [1] https://github.com/valentjn/vscode-ltex
|
| [2] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-
| dat...
| nshm wrote:
| For offline transcription try Vosk
| https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api
| [deleted]
| invalidator wrote:
| +1 for Vosk. If you want an easy way to get started with it,
| try mp4grep [1] which is a ready-made program you can unzip
| and run. To transcribe a whole file, simply:
| mp4grep --model ~/apps/mp4grep-0.1.1/model/ --transcribe
| filename.mp3
|
| The output is more intended for captioning so it's lots of
| short phrases with timestamps and no punctuation, but it'll
| give you a quick taste of what Vosk can do.
|
| [1] https://github.com/o-oconnell/mp4grep
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Dragon can do transcription and works pretty well. It's like
| $500.
| cracker_jacks wrote:
| Can a viable business be made around targets/victims sending
| their phishing attacks to a reverse engineering lab? The more
| valuable the target, the more likely an unknown and valuable
| exploit might be surfaced. As a consequence, this increases the
| expected cost of attacking these targets/victims.
| password4321 wrote:
| Like https://www.paypal.com/us/security/report-suspicious-
| message... ?
|
| > _Forward suspicious email to spoof@paypal.com_
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The way to do this properly as a reporter would be to record
| using a standalone voice recorder and transcribe using offline
| software (Dragon Naturally Speaking or something similar) on an
| air-gapped machine.
|
| If you're a reporter working on human rights pieces which involve
| nation states, you need to step up your game here or you're
| putting sources at risk.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Just like how The Intercept keeps burning its sources
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Reality_Winner_c...
| you pretty much have to assume any time you talk to a reporter
| you're like one step removed from talking to a cop. You cannot
| assume any security competence at all. Putting the source's full
| first and last name on the recording and then sending it to a
| third party, sheesh.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A reporter is just _some person,_ and may be a government
| informant, a corporate spy, or in the case of John Connolly a
| literal spy for the Church of Scientology.
| [deleted]
| barkingcat wrote:
| isn't this always the case? not every reporter works for the
| nyt and even then it's super leaky.
|
| if you talk to a reporter, 100% assumption your full name/full
| transcript/full video recording is going to be out there.
|
| "off the record" never meant anything.
| skybrian wrote:
| That's assuming there is a recording. If you meet in person
| somewhere and agree that they're only allowed to take notes,
| maybe there wouldn't be one? Or alternately, answer questions
| in writing and be careful what you say.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Many reporters use personal recording and pinhole cameras,
| etc. regardless of what they agree to. tools of the trade.
| [deleted]
| eesmith wrote:
| What other sources have they burned? That Wikipedia page only
| lists Winner.
| profunctor wrote:
| It also lists two other whistle blowers who blame that
| journalist.
| eesmith wrote:
| This part?
|
| > NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou and Guantanamo Bay
| detention camp whistleblower Joseph Hickman have both
| accused the same reporter accused of revealing Winner's
| identity, Matthew Cole, of playing a role in their
| exposure, which, in Kiriakou's case, led to his
| imprisonment.
|
| I don't see where Kiriakou and Hickman were sources to The
| Intercept.
|
| The [35] links to
| https://www.peterbcollins.com/2017/06/30/in-depth-
| interview-... which says:
|
| > In the final 5 minutes of the interview, both men share
| their stories of being burned by "journalist" Matthew Cole,
| whose work at ABC compromised Hickman and sent Kiriakou to
| prison. Cole was involved in the recent episode at The
| Intercept, where NSA leaker Reality Winner was apprehended
| after Cole shared her leaked document in an effort to
| verify it.
|
| The [36] links to https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-
| it-happens-tuesday-e... with (emphasis mine):
|
| > He later spent two years in prison for disclosing the
| identity of a fellow CIA officer to _then-freelance
| journalist Matthew Cole_ , one of four authors of Monday's
| Intercept report. While Cole did not publish the name, his
| email exchange with Kiriakou was used as evidence against
| him.
|
| So while I see Cole burning several sources, I only see The
| Intercept burning one.
| octodog wrote:
| Distinction without a difference. "The Intercept employs
| a journalist who has burnt 3 sources".
| fudged71 wrote:
| I feel dumb for thinking "Caveat emptor" in the title meant "end
| of story". I don't quite understand why latin terms are used so
| often when plain english gets the point across to more people.
| willhinsa wrote:
| Personally I find Latin phrases to be more accurate and
| succinct than their English replacements. Plus, there's a lot
| of phrases that you're probably super familiar with that you
| just don't think about their origin being Latin. When I come
| across a new Latin phrase, I just treat it like a special kind
| of phrase that I can learn, in an _ad hoc_ fashion. ;)
| messe wrote:
| As latin phrases go "Caveat Emptor" is a pretty common one; it
| didn't seem out of place to me.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Just a general linguistic phenomenon that source languages are
| sometimes invoked to elevate speech.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Otter.ai, collector of potentially incredibly sensitive user
| recordings, despite perhaps having a good privacy policy, has...
|
| 81 employees and no cybersecurity team from what I can tell.
| linkedin[.]com/company/otter-ai/people/?keywords=security
|
| Security and privacy isn't a tool, it's a set of tools in a
| logical stack and used according to correct processes. This is
| why focused newsroom security teams are so critical, but NYT
| fired their rep a few years ago and WSJ had or has generic
| security hires double-timing in that role. It sucks that
| Khashoggi wasn't more of a watershed moment for this.
|
| I wouldn't worry about privacy, I'd worry about threat actors
| popping otter and it's 0 security team to expose sources.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| They're likely already compromised and definitely will be after
| this story... they should hire a security lead and harden their
| systems right away.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Personal opinion is it's irresponsible to exist since 2016
| and have not hired someone for it yet, especially after these
| last years re: Solarwinds.
|
| The careers page is hiring a software eng - security which
| means someone who can build tooling, but won't have any
| policy/process power beyond what a VP Eng allows them. So
| good luck deploying necessary changes that that impact
| dev/product flows.
|
| This is the sort of stuff that gets security/privacy people
| upset at ex-Googler SV tech. Lot of hubris.
| speedgoose wrote:
| What's the point of using end to end encrypted messaging apps if
| you are going to send the recordings in clear text to third party
| companies ?
| dogman144 wrote:
| ya exactly haha. exactly.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's one thing if you are covering the zoning board. But seems
| incredibly dumb when you are interviewing someone routinely
| surveilled by a foreign intelligence service.
| Tepix wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like a big no-no to pretend towards your
| source that you are using E2E crypto and then to upload it to
| a 3rd party tagged with his name.
|
| You may have put their lives and the lives of their friends
| and family at risk.
|
| Next time Phelim Kine asks you for an interview, will you
| agree?
| sho_hn wrote:
| I get lambasting the author, but I think a more useful way
| to think here: They use Signal because they care (or think
| they should care) and because it's available. If there's no
| safe alternative available in the space Otter is in (and if
| you need a transcription tool now to be competitive as a
| journalist, perhaps) it means there's a market for building
| one.
|
| "Safe transcription app for journalists". Go do it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > If there's no safe alternative available in the space
| Otter is in (and if you need a transcription tool now to
| be competitive as a journalist, perhaps) it means there's
| a market for building one.
|
| Right, but in the meantime, if a government is hunting me
| and a journalist asks me to interview them, I want to
| know I'm secure. I don't want that to be reliant on
| whether or not a market I know nothing about exists.
| Definitely, it looks like there's a need for a safe
| transcription app for journalists. But that's not a
| license for them to be dangerous while they're waiting
| for that product to exist. Journalists have a moral
| responsibility to keep their sources safe _in the world
| that exists today._
|
| Otherwise, the takeaway seems to be that nobody with
| really sensitive information or in a vulnerable position
| should talk to journalists until after the tech industry
| builds an entirely new product, which probably isn't the
| outcome that anybody wants.
|
| We need to hammer out some degree of data security best
| practices that journalists won't break even in the
| instances where it makes their lives more inconvenient.
| Ideally, we should try to hammer out best practices that
| make it possible for a journalist to evaluate whether or
| not a service is appropriate to use. Otherwise we'll just
| play this endless game of cat and mouse where someone
| builds a transcription service that's private, and then
| another company builds this data-leaking collaboration or
| markup platform and that hole gets opened... at some
| point we have to teach journalists that there are certain
| _types_ of services that they should stay away from
| unless they meet certain criteria, and it sounds like a
| lot of journalists don 't have a good grasp on how to do
| that kind of security evaluation.
|
| Certainly, there's at least lack of education here about
| why we're using E2EE and what specific attacks it guards
| against if it's not ringing alarm bells with journalists
| when a service asks them to upload the raw interview to a
| remote server.
| danShumway wrote:
| We can focus on Otter.ai, but the quote that jumps out to me is:
|
| > Until those laws change, journalists and others who rely on
| transcription apps need to carefully consider the potential
| dangers.
|
| What this article is revealing to me is that journalists who are
| dealing with sensitive information aren't well-trained enough to
| recognize all of the dangers in the services they use. Knowing
| what I know about AI-driven services, even really large ones like
| Alexa or Siri, it would never be acceptable to me to use a remote
| service to transcribe an interview that absolutely had to be
| private and that hadn't already had all of the sensitive info
| redacted. It's a lack of knowledge about how AI works and how
| these networks are built and maintained (real people _do_ run
| into the information, and there _are_ bugs even in giant
| products).
|
| It's also a lack of knowledge about the security capabilities of
| the company: how is this information being stored, what
| encryption is being used, has the company been audited? It's
| really irresponsible, but I also believe the author when they
| said they just never thought about it before, I believe that it
| probably never crossed their mind that a big company might
| misplace data or that it might be forced to hand that data to a
| government.
|
| What's frustrating is the qualifier "until those laws change".
| There are a lot of potential risks to using a remote
| transcription service even if the laws are different. For
| ordinary people, legislation around privacy is important. But
| when dealing with information of this type, you need better
| security fundamentals. So this feels like the author still
| doesn't realize just how dangerous they're being by using a
| service like Otter.ai for interviews where someone's life might
| be at risk.
|
| ----
|
| On that subject, I also don't think calling out the journalist in
| this way is victim blaming; I think the victim here is the person
| being interviewed, and I think journalists have a moral
| responsibility to understand data security because the people who
| talk to them are trusting them to be able to keep that
| information safe. If you can't do that, then it's irresponsible
| to handle sensitive information that can harm other people. There
| are risks associated with handing any remote company an
| unencrypted interview with sensitive information that they will
| feed into an AI network, regardless of that company's intentions.
| That is not something a law can fix, you as a journalist need to
| be able to protect the people who trust you and you need to know
| the limitations of a company saying "we won't share this", you
| need to know what the inherent risks of the technology and
| process are instead of just trusting them.
|
| Not to let Otter.ai off the hook here; if they're aware of the
| fact that people are sending interviews where information leaks
| could be dangerous, they need to do a better job of educating
| their clients about what the risks are. The tech industry in
| general needs to do a better job of education here, we share some
| blame. What we are seeing is the effects of Google/Amazon/Apple
| creating an inaccurate picture of what AI is and of how private
| it is: we create this narrative where people assume that
| Siri/Alexa are just isolated boxes that sit in a vacuum where
| nothing can touch the data. And it turns out that's not accurate
| at all, metadata (like transcript titles) gets leaked from those
| services, people review transcripts and use it to keep training
| the AI, there are bugs that leak data across accounts. And there
| are real-world consequences to us training the public to
| disregard the possibility that those leaks can happen;
| consequences like journalists believing us and using our
| technology in irresponsible ways.
|
| I support privacy legislation, but privacy legislation will not
| make it OK for journalists to be irresponsible with sensitive
| information. There needs to be more of an understanding that for
| journalists who have clients who are in a position of extreme
| trust with them, some behavior is just inherently risky. It
| doesn't matter if there's legislation, if you're a journalist
| it's still not OK to send sensitive information over SMS, or do
| unencrypted phone calls to conduct sensitive interviews, or to
| send sensitive interviews to corporations that you don't have an
| extremely close relationship with. You have to learn data
| security, I'm sorry. To the extent we in the tech industry can
| help with that, it should be by making it clear that we mess up a
| lot and we leak a lot of data and we aren't magical wizards that
| can just decide to keep data safe -- all of that boasting about
| our privacy policies are just narratives we use to get more
| people to be more comfortable talking to their smart homes.
|
| ----
|
| > In the three months since that initial exchange (and there was
| more to come), I've gone down the rabbit hole -- talking to
| cybersecurity experts, press freedom advocates and a former
| government official -- to try and understand what vulnerabilities
| and risks are present in this app that's become a favorite among
| journalists for its fast, reliable and cheap automated
| transcription.
|
| This doesn't require a complicated rabbit hole of research, I can
| tell you right now that if the person you're interviewing is
| being hunted by a government, if they are "a wanted man", you do
| not put their interview on any service that is not fully end-to-
| end encrypted so that even the service can not access the data,
| period. We have enough technology and good enough encryption
| tools that you don't need to take that risk anymore. That means
| transcription, (regardless of whether it's AI-driven or manual)
| needs to happen on your own hardware.
|
| If it's not a sensitive interview, or if a leak would just be
| embarrassing or cost someone some money -- then sure, maybe you
| have different standards for that kind of information, use a
| remote transcription service for those interviews if you need to.
| But not for someone who's wanted by a government.
| 1-6 wrote:
| If you're looking for a good transcriber and know a little bit of
| Python, you can use Nvidia's Riva.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| The article was very sensationalist -- the survey was merely
| taking the title of the recording and trying to collect data on
| how users were using the platform. Normally I side against
| companies in these situation but there is literally no appearance
| of foul play or spookiness on otter's part -- most unsurprising
| thing ever really just a reporter that sees a survey asking about
| a title that he wrote himself and getting spooked because
| apparently even in 2022 tech is hard to grok for normies.
| mannykannot wrote:
| "An initial confirmation that the survey was legitimate was
| followed by a denial from the same Otter representative, laced
| with a warning that I "not respond to that survey and delete
| it." My communications with Otter were all restricted to email
| and were sporadic, often confusing and contradictory."
|
| That's where the story rises above the mundane.
| tedunangst wrote:
| The whole story would be much more clear with a complete
| email chain. We're given fragments and interpretations, but
| since the whole episode stems from a misunderstanding, none
| of it is reliable.
|
| "Not respond to that survey and delete it" is also the ending
| of a sentence that begins "if you would feel more
| comfortable, you can".
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Could be something more, but Occam's Razor says it's just
| support being like wtf is this and dropping the ball in
| handling the request.
|
| If support at your company got an email saying "omg!
| sensitive information in our recording is being referenced in
| this random survey we got from you!" I guarantee 2/3
| companies would flub the initial response because the support
| person doesn't understand the technical side of the issue
| which is that titles are used in one of the survey templates
| fjorde wrote:
| Journalists who deal in sensitive material should not trust
| any of that to any third parties to the greatest extent
| possible. If I were Chinese intel or the FBI, otter would
| be one of the richest targets imaginable for some of the
| most prized information on earth, i.e. high-value intel
| targets spilling secrets in "full-confidence" and divulging
| information they might never reveal even in court. otter
| also transcribes medical/psych convos and legal discussions
| as well, bringing the sum total of what they could "know"
| about any human, willing or not, to scary levels.
|
| Journalists who are casual or reckless with this kind of
| data shouldn't be in the business, and companies that don't
| make these kinds of risks apparent to their user base, or
| go to lengths to disguise a clear conflict of interest as
| bad support should not be in that business either.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Right but my point is there is nothing surprising or
| groundbreaking about the the fact that the journalist
| received the survey and that it contained the information
| that it contained, but media coverage of this is treating
| it like there was some shocking breach or cooperation
| with a foreign power when really it's quite a mundane
| situation by all accounts.
|
| The shocking revelation should be that journalists who
| normally are so careful they use end-to-end client-side
| encryption for their communications are using third party
| transcription services that have full access to their
| sensitive interviews. That's a faux pas and critical
| security blunder on the journalist's part, not otter's,
| though one learning here is maybe otter should consider
| offering some sort of secure enclave service for
| situations like this with additional guarantees and
| client-controlled encryption keys.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Does anyone know of something like Otter but offline with
| tolerable performance?
|
| Otter is the only thing approaching affordable for individuals,
| but I don't really trust it given they're playing fast and loose
| with user data.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| Pixel phones have a voice recorder that works offline and does
| this. I've used a bootleg apk I got off xdadevs of it on my
| samsung phone, and it works well. But for privacy or opsec
| that's probably even worse than a saas option.
|
| Ostensibly almost all newer/flagship iphone/android devices can
| do offline speech to text with passable accuracy. On Android it
| is (I suspect intentionally) nerfed to an accessibility feature
| called "live transcribe." It transcribes everything star wars
| style on the screen, but you can't save the audio or the
| transcription, you have to copy/paste the output which just
| disappears when you close the app. It's arbitrary and
| infuriating that it's like this.
|
| I'm generally a "hater" of the cloud, and I have to admit that
| Otter is very good. I used it speaking with someone using
| airpods on a shitty internet connection, with no noticeable
| drop in accuracy. Even spelled uncommon last names correctly.
|
| What I don't get is why none of these free apps can take a pre-
| recorded audio file as the input. Even for the paid services,
| this seems to be more limited than using the functionality
| 'live.' Is there some technical reason for this, or is it a
| sales department decision?
| habitue wrote:
| > But for privacy or opsec that's probably even worse than a
| saas option.
|
| Probably not, the attack vector of an apk of dubious
| provenance is probably that it sends all of your
| transcriptions to some 3rd party server. There's some non-
| zero probability that it does that, and it's possible you
| could run it in a network-less sandbox somehow to mitigate
| it.
|
| But with the saas service, you know for a fact it's going to
| a 3rd party server, who can store it for as long as they
| want. And if they aren't hacked now, they could be in the
| future.
| kadoban wrote:
| That analysis would be a lot more compelling if it didn't
| assume that all 3rd parties are the same.
|
| A 3rd party sending around a sketch apk that calls back to
| them is _definitely_ going to try to do something bad with
| it.
|
| Otter is unlikely to do something bad with it (it'd be bad
| for their business). So you should really compare the odds
| otter gets hacked vs the odds the apk is compromised.
| CasperDern wrote:
| Silero[0] seems to have decent performance (although you will
| have to some minimal coding). I believe there are better ones
| if you're willing to tinker a bit more.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models
| discreditable wrote:
| The Recorder app on Pixel phones offers on-device
| transcription. I'm not sure if it's available on other phones
| though.
| command_tab wrote:
| I've had great success doing transcription on-prem with
| Speechmatics: https://www.speechmatics.com They offer both a VM
| and a Docker image that you can run behind your firewall, and
| even license offline if you really need to. I use it for
| generating closed captions of videos, but you could build a
| transcription tool out of it as well. Their engine's accuracy
| is the best I've found out there, too, which is a nice bonus.
| totally_rad wrote:
| I recently found this new service called revoldiv.com few
| months back here on HN and I have been using it to transcribe
| and edit some of my videos. They are based in US and use AI to
| process their audio and transcripts. I believe the audio and
| transcripts are deleted once you close out the browser. It's
| the only service that I found so far with that level of
| capability to transcribe/edit for free and seems safe... at
| least right now.
|
| https://revoldiv.com/
| ghaff wrote:
| You can use Amazon Transcribe. The output is just a block of
| text but that's fine for a lot of interviews you're just going
| to grab a few sentences from.
|
| There are some various other services along similar lines to
| Otter.ai but don't remember names off the top of my head.
| yorwba wrote:
| I don't think Amazon Transcribe works offline.
| ghaff wrote:
| No but the parent's second line seemed to be a complaint
| about Otter specifically. I would probably trust Amazon to
| have good privacy practices generally though there's still
| some sensitivity line beyond which I wouldn't use an online
| service period even if they seem trustworthy in general.
| [deleted]
| axg11 wrote:
| I tried and failed to launch a startup in this space. The privacy
| concerns are huge. Most of the companies in this space
| (Fireflies, Otter, Vowel, ~Chorus, ~Gong) use external APIs for
| speech-to-text. That means unencrypted audio and plain text is
| traversing a 3rd party server. Most people don't care, but when
| there is eventually a security breach (only a matter of time)
| there will be a lot of surprised users and customers.
|
| With that said, the core idea is great. These companies are
| starting with transcription but it's not difficult to envisage a
| future where (a) supplemental information is presented depending
| on conversation topics, and (b) actions are taken on your behalf.
| Example: no more need to manually send a calendar invite, just
| mention it in the conversation and the "AI assistant" will
| schedule for you.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I had a family member who briefly dabbled in online
| transcription and made maybe a few hundred bucks doing it.
| Obviously they were required to sign an NDA and so on, but
| nonetheless, I was shocked at the recordings that they were
| sent-- for example, high level executive meetings where
| financial details and M&A strategy were being discussed.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm shocked that you got to hear those recordings that were
| supposedly under NDA.
|
| Well, not that shocked. I'm sure your uncle was generally
| being diligent. But really, you shouldn't have been able to
| find out what he was working on.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I wasn't hearing them directly, but I heard _about_ them
| because I was asked about some acronyms that were
| unfamiliar to the person doing the work.
|
| Definitely a grey area, but the point was more that
| literally anyone off the street can sign up to gig for one
| of these services and receive access to a bunch of
| potentially pretty sensitive audio.
| skoocda wrote:
| I also tried and failed here. We ran our own speech engine with
| a custom model- but it's extremely expensive as a cloud
| service, and incredibly tough to reach acceptably high accuracy
| in different environments. Adding NLP on top of error-prone
| transcripts will multiply the error rate and lead to all sorts
| of weird actions.
|
| I really think on-device models like we see in Android's Live
| Caption tool are a major privacy boon, and they're starting to
| reach an acceptable level of performance in Google's case. The
| main pathway to better performance is loading ever-more-massive
| models into memory, which isn't feasible for mobile devices but
| could be done on people's laptops in a meeting.
| toyg wrote:
| "Privacy", "on-device", and "Google", all in the same
| sentence...? Sounds unrealistic.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| So Phelim Kine leaked a source's name and the details of their
| conversation to a third party because it was cheaper and more
| convenient than doing their own transcription, and is now trying
| to blame the third party?
| tedunangst wrote:
| The conclusion of the article is that we need to change the law.
| Will that prevent China from hacking otter to obtain transcripts?
| carbocation wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading this poorly, but it feels very poorly written.
|
| The opening stanzas describe a conversation over Signal, followed
| by a message from Otter.ai. But there is no initial disclosure
| that the journalist sent the conversation to Otter. The way the
| story is written, it sounds like Signal was hacked or his phone
| was exploited.
|
| Later, he states:
|
| > _" Otter said that the fact that Aksu was the focus of the
| survey was only because I'd entered his name as the recording's
| title."_
|
| So OK, you submitted a recording to Otter? Why not disclose that
| you used Otter intentionally:
|
| > _Apparently I wasn't the only Otter user worried about this
| kind of scrutiny. "This survey has been discontinued over
| concerns that some customers (such as yourself) may include
| personal or sensitive information within the title of the
| conversation, and including this information within a survey may
| cause some concern," Lai said._
| danso wrote:
| The author does state that they were using Otter -- it's at the
| beginning of the anecdote
|
| > _The next day, I received an odd note from Otter.ai, the
| automated transcription app that I had used to record the
| interview._
| carbocation wrote:
| Confirmed that I am reading poorly--thanks for pointing out
| this line, I had missed it.
|
| Archive.today link demonstrating that this isn't a stealth
| edit by Politico: https://archive.is/etLpm
| magicjosh wrote:
| Ya the core of the article is missing a key point.
|
| Did you enter "Mustafa Aksu" as the title of the Otter
| recording? If so, they just took the text you entered and
| emailed it to you. Why did you write this sensationalist
| article?
|
| If they transcribed it and send it to you, maybe there's
| something here. But expecting Otter to be secure is an entirely
| different issue. But the article conflates this whole thing
| about the title with insecurity and it's unclear.
|
| There is certainly an article to be written about the dangers
| of using Otter. But this stuff about the email and the title is
| a distraction. It attempts to "storify" something that doesn't
| need it. Automated recording means sending recordings to the
| cloud where you don't control them. That's a terrible idea for
| sensitive content. Full stop. That's the article.
|
| Disclosure: have used Otter, like it, but wary of security
| issues. Self hosted option sounds good.
| ellen364 wrote:
| > Did you enter "Mustafa Aksu" as the title of the Otter
| recording? If so, they just took the text you entered and
| emailed it to you.
|
| Returning information to users can be a surprisingly delicate
| matter. E.g. HIV clinics and mental health services (in the
| UK) are careful about the information they put in appointment
| reminders. Sure the patient signed up for the appointment,
| but they don't necessarily want a voicemail or text message
| to mention the type of clinic.
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