August 31st, 2024 – Funniest AI Mistakes in Transcripts

I once wrote a post (Should I Be Worried About AI?) detailing the reasons why I think AI will not be replacing jobs like mine any time soon. The more I work with AI programs, the more those feelings are validated and solidified.

As you know, my business covers all of your scopist, proofreading, and transcription needs. Transcription is a big business and I’ve been doing a lot of transcription work as of late. What has become common in transcription these days is to use an AI scribe program in order to get a first draft of the dialogue. This normally comes in one big block of text, and it is the transcriptionists job to separate speakers and edit it against the audio file. As you can imagine, this has lead to some amazingly terrible translations from the AI transcription program.

These mistakes happen for a variety of reasons, but I’ve noticed some common patterns. Accents that are other than North American, when speakers talk over each other or speak too quickly, and when there are translators involved seem to be where the AI simply cannot keep up. Today, I want to show you some of the funniest mistakes I have seen when the AI program was left to decide what the speakers said. Some of these I have the correct translation for, and others were from foreign languages and therefore, I do not have their translation.

A. I think I was taking something called baths for women.

This one was so far off, I had to listen to the audio more than once to make sure I wasn’t the one going crazy. In this particular instance, the speaker was referring to a drug called Metformin. The AI program heard, “baths for women.” Trust me, I listened, there was not a B sound anywhere in that sentence.

Q. Where were you working?
A. Started a taxi out from hell.

This was a translator that the AI picked up. One thing the AI absolutely cannot seem to do is distinguish between languages, and it will simply write the phonetic versions of the things it hears. So, where this witness was trying to say he was working as a taxi driver, the AI absolutely did not hear that.

A. He’s amazing.
Q. Is he at the North Pole?

This one was so funny to me simply because the inference that this amazing person may be Santa Clause, and that had me giggling. This amazing person, to everyone’s surprise, was not Santa Clause.

A. Then, my employer is slow murder.

Reading this made me both laugh and say, “Well, we’ve all been there.” This was another instance where the speaker was a translator interpreting a question to the witness.

A. I’m not able to place new turkey legs anymore. Well, not bottom to bottom. Never go to jail. Sure, go to jail. Attack!

No surprise that this is also a translator speaking to the witness. The way in which these individual ideas all came together made me laugh a lot.

And my all time favourite:

Q. What did the doctor’s tell you about the cause of your pain?
A. They don’t know yet. They’re saying it’s Trump.

This one killed me because the witness started to say, “The r –” but then said, “Ummm.” This is what the AI program heard as a result.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of things that I like about my work, this is only one of them, but it is a good one. I have no fears about AI stealing my job and I love how often the programs being used can validate those feelings. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! If you liked this post or want to share your own experiences and tips, make sure to leave a comment down below. If you want to see more, check out the last post below or the previous posts on the blog. And if you’re interested in learning more scopist, proofreading, or transcription information, make sure to check back for a new post on the Next Step Scopist blog!

—-

Home | Blog Home
Last Post: The Necessity of Feedback
Next Post: Should I Be Offering Free Trials/Samples?