ROGER ZIMMERMAN: Before we get into more of the technology,
let's go over the best practices, just to keep
those in the forefront there.
And later, when we do go deeper into the technology,
hopefully, you'll see some of the motivation for these best
practices.
But let's put first things first.
And the key best practice, of course,
is that this technology assumes--
and if I may be so strong as to say,
requires-- that the text corresponds to the audio.
The assumption is that the transcript you are uploading
is a faithful rendition of the audio in the media file.
So what are some of the common problems
we've seen thus far as regards this correspondence?
Well, as Dave just showed you, we
do want to be able to know that the speaker IDs are just
labels and not spoken text.
So if they conform to our standards, which
is they occur at the beginning of the line
and they're all caps followed by colon, the technology will
understand that they are not spoken, and in fact,
will use the fact that a new speaker is
speaking to improve the output.
So getting those speaker IDs to conforming format is important.
Another thing to be aware of is that any wrapped
text, any time you have a hard carriage return in the text,
the technology assumes that will be a paragraph.
It doesn't matter if it's single line feed or double line feed.
That's just an assumption made by the technology.
Now, when you export a text document in Word,
it doesn't do this.
It keeps all paragraphs together in one line.
But you just need to be aware of that
when you're exporting from other formats,
or if your document came from some other source.
We've seen cases where the document
itself is kind of a script and it
includes instructions, screen directions, scene headings,
headers, footers from the document, page numbers.
All those things are assumed to be spoken by the technology,
and of course, will lead it astray.
So I want to emphasize that those kinds
of extraneous metadata will definitely
interfere with the performance of the technology.
If they occur only sporadically, the technology
can usually recover.
But that kind of thing will definitely interfere.
And I might want to mention, in that context,
any sort of timing information is also
text that's assumed to be spoken and should optimally
be removed.
Interpretation is a little bit of a fuzzy area.
But basically, any time a transcript
tries to reinterpret what a speaker is saying
in spontaneous speech, that can be problematic
or that can be an area of misalignment.
Usually, the biggest problem there is when speakers restart.
When they hesitate and restart, we
can have some issues with that.
Now, it's going to be very rare for a transcript
to cover those kind of restarts literally.
But we just want to make you aware of that.
Any time the audio has overlapping speakers-- people
speaking at the same time-- of course,
it's really difficult to represent that textually.
And so that's another area where alignment will have a problem.
Again, if it's not a prevalent feature of the media file,
it shouldn't be too bad.
But again, it's something to be aware of.
And finally, just as with our captioning and transcription
service, the overall audio quality
is a kind of correspondence with the text.
If we have trouble discerning the speech because
of the audio quality, be it background noise,
frequency characteristics, and such,
that will impact the alignment.
So it's all pretty straightforward, but definitely
things to be aware of in terms of keeping
the text in correspondence with the audio.
So Dave, why don't you take it from there
on the best practices?
DAVID ZYLBER: Sure.
As Roger was talking, you might have
seen that I was pulling up a poorly formatted version
of our screenplay, Casablanco.
And this is clearly something you would not
want to submit here.
There's a lot of extraneous text.
It even tells you the play that we based
this amazing screenplay off of.
So is this the kind information we wouldn't want to see.
We'd want to see it more like this, which as you'll notice,
is a lot more simplified.
It kind of just removes all of that extraneous information.
It just has speaker identification and the spoken
words.
We do have a couple of instances here where
we call out some sound effects.
And Roger, I believe that's OK, right?
ROGER ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, it's OK.
Because it's a fairly small amount of text,
the technology will insert it at the best timing
points where it can fit it, and it will move on from there.
DAVID ZYLBER: Yeah.
So use that within reason.
And I would say before formatting,
we have these articles up on our support site.
These are great references to kind of refresh
your memory about the best practices before uploading.
And if you adhere to these, the results
will be far better had you not.