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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I once tried to build a German service for transcribing online meeting calls, similar to what UberConference now offers, by using a cloud API for the STT.

Oh wow was I surprised to see the quality. All of the cloud providers are abysmally bad at transcribing German.

I believe the reason is that in German, you can make up word combinations on the fly and use them as valid nouns. And people do that, if it's convenient or if it enables you to be more precise.

"Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft" = Society (Gesellschaft) for Driving (Fahrt) of Boats (Schiff) with Steam (Dampf)

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> Society (Gesellschaft)

In this context, Gesellschaft translates to Company. (GmbH=LLC)

The spelling also depends on whether you're talking about the historical Erste Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft or any generic Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft – note the ff vs. fff in middle; the old company name retains its pre-1996 spelling.

Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft without hyphens was as far as I can tell never officially used by the company, but used informally as part of the name of the Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänstango, a 1930s song.

In my experience, they're pretty poor in English too. Especially when it's ad hoc conversation where people don't finish sentences, repeat themselves, "um" and "err" etc

A problem most people don't think about when talking about transcription is that people don't talk like books. Not only do you get unfinished sentences and filler words, you also get garbled words, non-standard pronunciation, and so on.

In the case of pronunciation this primarily poses a problem with detecting the intended word, but in other cases "cleaning up" the output may lose contextual information (e.g. what a speaker was going to say before cutting themselves off and using a different word). This is difficult enough for a human to get right, let alone a machine.

Also, when transcription programs (most familiar example: YouTube) fail, they usually fail on the words that a human listener would also have trouble understanding / telling apart. So the transcription is useful if you are deaf or forced to watch the video without sound, but if you're using subtitles because your English is not good enough to understand the speakers without them, their usefulness is pretty limited...

Once you go beyond ~7 words (= what people would utter to their virtual assistant), the quality of all off the shelf tools (both open source and offered services) is laughable. Sentence boundary detection, punctuation, speaker segmentation, and all those features you would need for good transcription are in a really bad state.

"Really bad" is an exaggeration, I think. The auto-transcription features in both Google Meet and Zoom are more than acceptable, they're often very useful in catching missed words during a meeting.

They trip up on technical jargon but handle everyday conversations just fine, including speaker detection, punctuation, idioms, etc.

But that's also a slightly different use case, where each speaker is in their own (somewhat) quiet environment and on separate connections (and thus audio tracks).

It's much harder to do all that after the fact, like with a recorded video.

I find Trint.com, which is partially automatic, to be good for that... the AI does a first pass, and a human cleans it up afterward. YouTube has a similar assisted-auto feature for their captions, minus speaker separation.

After the simplification of spelling system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... ), German got a big advantage: you can write and read nearly everything, even if you don't know its meaning.

Due to much more complicated grammar German is much more difficult to learn than English, but at least the spelling is easy.

I wonder why more languages never try to simplify their orthographies. Children could spend years learning useful things, instead of wasting time on spelling.

Controversial opinion here: they should have removed ß (sharffes S) completely. It is still used in some relatively rare cases.

After reading the last line of your comment I put the words back in the German word (in English) and got -

SteamBoatDrivingSociety

Which actually made complete sense even in English!

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