[HN Gopher] The Echo in the Machine
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       The Echo in the Machine
        
       Author : danso
       Score  : 6 points
       Date   : 2025-06-04 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (radiolab.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (radiolab.org)
        
       | danso wrote:
       | Transcript here: https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-echo-in-the-
       | machine/transcr...
       | 
       | This is an audio story about the invention of closed caption
       | systems. A few parts that I found fascinating:
       | 
       | > _MEREDITH PATTERSON: But by the beginning of 2003, it was
       | becoming apparent that not enough steno writers were available to
       | match the growing amount of content that needed to be
       | captioned...: I was very junior, and maybe that 's why I was
       | tasked with experimenting with some software that we called the
       | "black box."_
       | 
       | > _SIMON: Little things like the news broadcaster throwing to the
       | weatherman would totally trip it up. It didn 't include
       | punctuation. And accents of any kind were an issue. However, what
       | it could do pretty darn well was transcribe her voice, which led
       | to a sort of crazy idea...What if she just echoed every word said
       | on television into the computer? Maybe she could close caption
       | that way._
       | 
       | I was also surprised that through 2020, the national captioning
       | center was fully staffed by humans and growing. And only recently
       | have they begun replacing humans through attrition with AI:
       | 
       | > _SIMON: ... that technology they had started playing around
       | with back in the early 2000s, just, like, the black box, AI
       | running the feed directly into the computer, it works pretty damn
       | well. It works well enough that you basically no longer need a
       | human in the system at all. Meaning this dance? It 's winding
       | down, it's coming to an end. Today, Meredith says AI is doing
       | around 50 percent of the closed captioning the National
       | Captioning Institute is hired to do._
        
       | gryfft wrote:
       | They skip straight past steno typers to go deep on voice writing,
       | but that's its own rabbit hole. Plover has been linked here a few
       | times.
       | 
       | Before health issues stalled her career, my wife got licensed to
       | be a court reporter. It's a fascinating discipline and its top
       | tier practicioners will certainly outperform AI as long as humans
       | still have any kind of edge on computers anywhere. For business
       | purposes, "good enough" automatic transcription is going to
       | steamroll the market for these services, though.
       | 
       | Feels like a strange echo of the industrial revolution, the world
       | suddenly flooded with mass-produced things.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-04 23:01 UTC)