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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

The big names provide recording and transcription now - Zoom has it, Teams has it (Teams apparently does it realtime and live and it's not bad, great for the deaf!).

I suppose those are part of paid plans, and they trigger the "your shit is being recorded, dude." warnings.

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Zoom's live and post-meeting transcription happens to be done using licensed Otter.ai code.

That's not the news. The news is that otter.ai did it automatically and even though the user had it disabled.

Don't the need the permission of all participants to transcribe?

No you do not - at least not technically! I had to look into this at work. I looked at WebEx, Teams, and Zoom - all three let auto-transcribe just roll. I think on one of them it gives a quick popup saying it's transcribing but no consent required. Contrast with audio/video recording where Zoom lets you either consent or leave the meeting. I asked our legal counsel and they said it's kind of iffy whether live auto-transcription counts as recording - didn't seem like a settled matter.

The big difference here is that in such a scenario all of the participants explicitly use the Teams or Zoom and they're technically "getting notified about recording" in the terms and conditions of Teams or Zoom telling that Microsoft or Zoom is getting the recordings which they got when starting to use Teams or Zoom. However, in that bot scenario, none of the other participants are users of otter.ai, have no relationship with them and so can't grant any permissions.

In Teams at least, it's called transcription, but really it's captioning. It's not recorded unless you also turn on recording.

Can you cut the text out of the caption window before leaving? The one I saw it was appearing in chat (I think?).

Maybe? But you can also point a camera at your screen and record the whole thing...or do it in software with screen/audio capture.

The point is the app isn't recording without telling people just to do captioning.

No app prevents bad actors from recording.

Depends on the jurisdiction. In many states you only need 1st party consent to record a call. If you're ON the call (as opposed to say, wire taping it...) you're your own first party.

I think as long as you notify people and give them the opportunity to disconnect that's generally considered consent, as with 800 numbers where they tell you calls are recorded for quality assurance or whatever.

The company who predominantly works in that space is called "CallMiner".

Zoom does realtime too

Slack even has it.

Webex...

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