The End For Boring Business Conversations

Young people during education time tend to think that “nothing can be more boring as lectures by this or that professor”.  Wrong. The conversations with a boss that never stops talking, or even better, business partners with whom you always hang on the phone for…eternity. This is boring. 
An then from the other side. I can’t understand why reports are not a recognised literature genre. The way people try to bring the complex reality into words varies from never-ending texts to short passages. An art is what people do by writing them as well as what readers do by trying to decode them.

But thank a new technology the time is over for boredom. The longest established help has been automatic speech recognition (ASR), the technology that converts the spoken word to text. More recently it has been joined by subtler techniques that go beyond what you say, and analyse how you say it. State-of-the-art ASR has an error rate of 30 to 35 per cent, and that’s just very annoying. Fortunately today we have a new invention developed at IBM Research in Almaden, California.

Catchup, designed to summarise in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so the latecomers can… well, catch up with what they missed. Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones. It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a “stop list” of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest. More

A key feature of Catchup is that it then presents the result in audio form, so the latecomer hears a spoken summary rather than having to plough through a transcript what provides a much better user experience and help. Imagine how many tons less of small papers with flowers, stars and other signs that we don’t necessarily want to mention that we draw during long conversation. Actually a must-have and even eco-friendly.