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Comment by chucky_z | Hacker News Reader

One of my family members has permanently lost their job in transcription. It's not that they've lost their job either, essentially the entire field across all specialities (including legal and medical) just doesn't exist anymore as of ~this year (2023).

There are still some 'editor' positions, however they don't pay very well and I'd imagine they won't be around long either.

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Language translation services have thrived despite Google Translate etc because they did so poorly. However the LLM do a pretty amazing job translating idiomatic language, so I think translating text as a career is effectively over beyond editorial revision of the automated text.

Try in ChatGPT asking it to translate some passage of relative complexity into idiomatic Thai. Start a new chat. Ask it to translate the Thai, pasted in, into idiomatic English. This was always a way to test how bad exactly Google translate is. It’s essentially flawless with ChatGPT.

I showed my brother in law, who is Thai in Thailand and who works for an English speaking multinational. It’s revolutionized his job. He struggled to be understood, and struggled with Google translate to make something understandable. Now he’s able to conduct his business without friction.

It'll probably remain for the very complex translation tasks that are performed by highly qualified experts, like translating poetry from archaic versions of modern languages and such. Also diplomatic exchanges and official translations of documents, where you can't just deflect blame to an AI tool for something that could damage international relations or leave someone without a visa or nationality.

More regular "business" translation will probably be displaced by AI tools.

Before making this assumption: ask chatgpt 4.0 right now.

In general the default should flip from it can't do x to it can do it until ypu tried it and verfied it.

Also, be sure to retest with every new release.

Reminds me of a story about a surgeon who was an angry opponent of robot surgery until he watched it. When it went in though a tiny hole for what use to require cutting a door in the patient he was already convinced.

> Language translation services have thrived

I had some modest experience with this and “thrived” doesn’t line up with how the translators I worked with described it even a decade ago – they loved our project because we valued quality, whereas most of the work they were seeing was rapidly declining wages because Google Translate was good enough to get businesses to decide they didn’t need to pay much for humans.

I’m pretty sure you’re right that this is the death knell for translation as a career unless it’s in combination with some other scholarly skill.

As someone who worked in transcription last year I would say the biggest reason for transcription job losses in the West is competition from India where English speakers are willing to do transcription for a fraction of the cost.

Fully automatic transcription by AI is a very, very hard problem, based on my experience of many of the jobs I got*. The automatic transcription makes the work 10X easier now though by applying a first pass that gets you 90% of the way and then humans like me come in and fix it all up.

* One hard example was a motorcross race commentary where it was necessary to know which riders the commentators were referring to based on their amusing and sarcastic comments, the nicknames of the riders, and deal with the fact the audio was 99% revving engines.

I’m sorry your family member lost their job, that’s always rough. That being said, the field of transcription is nowhere near dead. Bighand does transcription and dictation solutions and their annual revenue is over 70 million.

I think they meant the job doing transcription is dead, not that corporations don't provide the service anymore. In keeping with the topic, AI taking jobs, corporations are mostly using digital tooling rather than people to do transcription.

I think that’s what they mean, but they are wrong. Ask any large legal firm in the UK if they’ve gotten rid of all transcriptionists, I’ll buy you a pint if they say yes

That's a better question to ask in a year or two.

Parent claimed that ”the entire field across all specialities (including legal and medical) just doesn't exist anymore as of ~this year (2023).”, and that's patently false - the field still definitely exists and plenty of people work in transcription.

People have been predicting speech recognition replacing human secretaries since the 1950s, starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

Might be worth asking if they’ve gotten rid of any, or some such jobs.

You don’t have to get rid of all jobs in a field for it to have major impacts.

But the claim wasn't "some jobs have been eliminated", it was ”the entire field across all specialities (including legal and medical) just doesn't exist anymore as of ~this year (2023).”

Do they employ humans to do the transcription? A look at their jobs page has zero such openings. This points to consolidation of an entire industry into the pockets of a small number of individuals. That's no comfort to the legions of recently-unemployed.

The legal offices employ humans, Bighand provides tools to enable said work. If there was no transcription happening, dictation tools would not be selling for tens of millions per year

One thing we've seen for transcriptions in medical field (which may also be relevant in legal and others) is a need for a qualified specialist (i.e. the doctor who dictated the thing or did the patient interview) to review and sign-off the final transcription. Currently a transcriptionist does the bulk of the work, and the doctor reviews it; however, with better tools, the doctor would just use the dictation tool directly and review the automated output directly, cutting the 'transcription office' out entirely.

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