Review of Otter.AI

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Software dictation has been around for absolutely ages,

All the way from early Dragon software, which used to take hours and hours to learn an individual, and even then wasn’t particularly good.

They have come on in leaps and bounds with modern phones chattering to the internet in order to do diagnostics and proper translation, but even then they’re not real time at true conversational speed over more than a short sentence.

When one claims to be absolutely amazing at transcribing, and able to do it for meetings and multiple voices, I have to say I was more than a little suspicious, and this is what Otter AI claims.

Now I didn’t want it for meetings. I wanted it for writing blog posts like this one, but I wanted to just rant while wearing a headset, and for it to keep up with me, rather than for me to stop/start or talk in a slightly stilted fashion. I find that even the Google or Amazon stuff only gets about 9 words in 10 right, and often get sentences scrambled, often because it interprets something I’ve said that is technologically or geekily specific, as a generic word.

So I was introduced to Otter AI, and after I got past the forced way they are selling it, it is actually a very clever mixture of relatively new and old style technology.

When you use it, they say that you’re supposed to dictate into it, and then it will do magic to make everything amazing.

Don’t get overexcited. What it actually does is use standard speech to text for what you’re seeing in real time, where it gets the normal 9 out of 10 words right. And then once you’ve finished your meeting/rant, it will send your audio up to the internet and have another go at it with a lot more accuracy, as it can do it at its leisure.

This turns out to be a brilliant idea. Although they should really sell it better rather than just confusing the hell out of you.

Their target audience is obviously for long meetings or meeting note takers, not people who actually just want a decent accurate natural voice dictation app, the UI reflects that, the first few times I used it I desperately kept trying to stop and edit the text I was working on, but that is not how you do it.

The ordinary real time voice to speech conversion just acts as a general guide to what you have been saying, its not the final product, just say what you have got to say, save it, and let it clean everything up. Once you’ve got the hang of that as a process, then it’s a brilliant tool.

It’s amazing for dictating large formats or even quick blogs and notes. it has a good export feature which while not perfect, will happily export my monologues to WordPress and dump them into a standard post which I can then edit.

However again their market position is very off for my kind of usage. It seems to be only priced for people who are doing hours upon hours of meetings. Whereas people like myself that just want it for dictation are never going to come off the free tier, They’ve got no reason to. So they should really introduce say a £5 a month tier with some slight advantages (say a upgraded export to blog platforms). without that, people like me will never have a genuine reason to purchase it.

However all in all, if you’re wanting to write blog posts, or just take notes that you can then export as text. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Corporate phrase: “Thin Mint”

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Explanation:

This is a management strategy used mainly against people that provide deliverables such as developers.

It’s a two phase strategy.

The first stage is to ask about a largish deliverable, one that might take a full sprint (2 weeks) or more and to get a firm completion date on it. When the developer/resource gives that date as an honest answer based on 100% of their time being dedicated to it, write that down, write it in stone.

Then later on, even in the same planning meeting, ask for a much smaller deliverable, suggest a much shorter delivery date “as it will only take a sec”, But crucially don’t mention it in context to the larger delivery already promised.

Keep doing this until the developer massively over commits, but in a way that you are not to blame as you asked them in the hearing of others on a meeting.

This is a classic old school dirty trick for those who care far more about project plans than deliverables, and originally came from the Mr. Creosote seen in Monty Python’s the meaning of life.  

 

 

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

Management Nugget No 16: “Know your deliverables”

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“A completed project is the deliverable, not a completed project plan”

Explanation:

One thing that affects larger projects and particularly affects a number of project managers who tend to think about the organisation of a project rather than the project itself. Is that people lose sight of what actually constitutes a deliverable, and therefore you end up spending a lot of time actually delivering to the organisation of a client or company, when that is not a genuine deliverable,  1

The easiest way to see this in action is on project plans with particular reference to delivery dates. while the dates are important milestones, they are only important in respect to the information they provide to other parts of the project, for example a financial audit or arranging a training company or what ever, and unless they are backed up with solid logic and delivery foundations you are building a house of cards, be very very wary of people who want a delivery date based on a guess just so they can fill in a plan.

However the important part of this is to make sure that delivery capable people, such as developers, or business analysts do not spend excessive time doing this, such time is lost time to the real delivery of the project, if a PM needs such dates then they should be the person working them out not transferring this difficulty to someone else.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

  1. A Genuine delivery is one that either saves/makes money for a company or materially effects its place in the market place[↩]

Acid Bath and Acid Sam

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The “Acid bath” is a standard fitness set which consists of the following: For standards these all have to be done on the concept2 range of equipment, and they are done at the end of a session. My current pre session consists of 5 rounds ( not done for time) of: 3 chin ups 5 dips 15 Kettlebell Swings (@ 24kg for me) 250m Ski erg (steady pace) Adult males are supposed to do it in 6 mins or less, ladies in 7 mins. I can just do it under 6 minutes (5:52) and it’s significantly harder on the concept 2 stuff, than it is on the run of the mill gym equipment, as the week before this video, I managed a 5:25 with no worries and even a sip of water. I will post regular attempts at trying to get this time down, just as a personal record. Also I’m a little bit obsessed with something I’m going to call “Acid Sam”. So Sam Bradley my awesome PT. Does kettlebells as his major thing with me, and it’s taught me to love them far more than normal weights. One of his challenges is to do 100 kettlebell swings (using a session weight of 24kg) in five minutes, currently I can comfortably do it in 10 mins and at a push can do it in 9. However, this begs the terrible question if you can do the 100 kettlebell snatches in five minutes, and a reasonably good time to do the Acid bath is also 5 minutes, then theoretically you could do them both back to back in 10 minutes. Extremely stupid, but awesome to have a good goal.

Corporate phrase: “Silo Guardian”

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Explanation:

Someone who works in a massively provincial or localised way, resisting any form of globalisation or integration with other systems, such people have often been burnt by previously failed global projects or are just protecting a job, not necessarily evil and often quite talented, just resistant to any change. Sometimes called a “Smaug” Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.