Indexing by speach to text.

LegacyUser

Helle Thor Hirschmann said: I have been doing Family History for a very long time. (Summer 1977). I LOVE IT. Sometimes I get the impression, that things have to speed up A LOT. One idea that repeat coming back is: Speach to text. I have been typing for many years professionally and am very good. But speaking is much faster. (My mom is 80 and can't type at all). Some of the programs for speach to text are very pricy, but some are cheap or even free. And a program to receive the data? I know a ton about genealogy but not much about programming. Smartphones and headsets are getting really cheap, so a program to speak the text, and a program to store the record. Would speed the process up a lot. But HOW.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: That sounds a great idea for FamilySearch to investigate and implement as an option, as voice is considered to be so much faster then typing. I would think it would be a very cost effective use of money for FamilySearch.

As part of the process, FamilySearch should have a structured voice recognition module, as I understand it takes a while for the technology process to learn to recognise your voice.

A friend, whose husband is a doctor, is able to dictate all his medical reports and then have the dictation be produced as a typed report by the software.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Speech to text kinda works on things like emails, although homophones can seriously trip it up. It fails utterly and completely on names. They're just not spelled at all consistently. 90% of indexing consists of deciphering names.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: A good point. I know that we tell people not to get hung up on spelling, but if someone consistently spells their name as "Tayleur", it would be nice to have it indexed like that and not "Taylor". I know that the temptation would be to say, "Go back and fix it on the keyboard if you need to" but I worry that the work necessary there would swamp any other saving - especially if, as Juli suggests, much of the effort is in reading, not typing.

That said, I'm part way through transcribing a will using speech-to-text, but then I suspect that the majority of words there are simply recognised.

LegacyUser

Helle Thor Hirschmann said: The speech function can be used for at ton of things like stories from our own lives too.
But part of my thought was to index an entry in a record entirely. Like while I read my Father-i-Laws GGrandfathers birth record in Lauf-an-der-Pegnitz in Germany it read:
Dritte Kind, Zweite Knabe. To some it may mean nothing, but it means "Third child, second boy". But F-i-L's record only showed a girl in that family before Konrad Hirschmann. By closer inspection we discovered a boy who died at age 1 1/2.
Why it could be important to have the entire record indexed?
Because the percentage of persons able to read a hand written text is deminishing by the hour. Witnesses at a baptism or a wedding are usually close kin. In a census you may find very important informations: like the 1901 and 1930 census here in Denmark have a column to the far right stating the year of marriage of the parents, (if the person is a widow/er, often the death year of the spouse), number of living children and children who have died at that point of time.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Indexes need to be as precise as humanly possible. While there are some very good voice entry programs out there, they are still prone to problems. Plus, there would be some major problems with indexing records that are not in the voice entry language.

The idea is admirable, but when it comes to indexes, those need to be precisely entered as they appear in the original record(s).

LegacyUser

Juli said: Don't confuse "index" with "transcription". An index is a finding aid: it contains some of the important details from a record, for the purpose of making it easier to find the record. It's not cost-effective to include every detail from a record in an index.

GeneaDroid

Please refer me to a team leader that needs volunteers to help on the FS Alexa voice interface. I have a BA and MA from BYU and 20+ years of experience as FS user and FS missionary. I come to Provo on Friday mornings every week. My email is GeneaDroid@gmail.com. Thanks in advance, Michael Helmantoler