Mark 0:06
We’ll be talking more about Zoom because this is becoming more and more popular isn’t it, this video conferencing.
Seamus 0:34
It really is. Yeah, and just, everyone’s just using it so much, it’s quite incredible really, so people use for personal stuff as well as businesses, small and large and volunteer organisations, all using Zoom to record their meeting ah sorry to talk virtually, as in video conferencing,
Mark 0:56
I think also because you’ve now got Microsoft, you’ve now got Facebook and all that, trying to play catch up with these guys. And also recently had worries about security but they’re being attended to as well, but something that I never knew that she could do and that is in a Zoom meeting, you can actually record that meeting, is that the organiser that can record the meeting or can anybody involved in the meeting record.
Seamus 1:20
You set that up in your settings in your Zoom login page and you can set it up so that only the host can record, or you can set it up so that anyone can record. And I’m fairly certain you can set it up so it automatically records. I’m not sure that, whether that’s a good idea because you should ask everyone in the first place or inform them that you’re recording the meeting. And quite often the beginning of the meeting sort of personal stuff where you’re saying hello, so I don’t know, I personally don’t automatically record but I do record a lot of business or, you know, volunteer organisation meetings.
Mark 2:01
Yeah, I do you know like when I’m in meetings myself and a motion comes up. Do you have any objections to the meeting being recorded? Now if there’s no objection or it’s passed, then the recording starts. So, how do you do when it goes up on the screen so that the organiser just goes click?
Seamus 2:26
Yeah, there’s just a little button down the bottom that says “record”. And you just click that and a little notification comes up on the top left of your screen, to say that the meeting is being recorded – obviously you have to inform people but it’s really very very easy. And the big thing for, particularly, obviously not, you know, if you’re really talking to your family or something like that or friends. But for businesses or volunteer organisations it’s really handy actually to record the meeting because if you ever get any disputes, you can go back and find it and say yes well this is what you said at the meeting. But, of course, finding that information if you’ve been to three meetings in the past week and you know someone said something at one of those meetings, you’ve got to trawl through the recordings and you know that can be quite painstaking. So, the options, then are to transcribe each meeting into text. Now, transcription services have just improved tremendously in the past. Well, a huge boost in the past few months but there are a few newcomers that have come into this area. And one of them is called otter.ai, which I have briefly talked about before. But they’ve actually partnered with Zoom now so they’re Zooms official transcription partner so you know if you have á business just starting and suddenly you are Zooms official partner I think you’d be dancing for joy. So if you’ve got the business version of Zoom which is about $28 a month. That does cloud transcriptions for you so it when you record something it records it and stores it in their cloud storage, and then transcribes it there. So you’ve got the transcription and the video together.
Mark 4:27
Oh, my god it’s like it has its own little club secretary puts into words what is being said in the meeting.
Seamus 4:35
Exactly. Yeah, incredible is quite really quite efficient. I use it here for because I put the transcription of our discussions up on my web site after I’ve done them. So I use this otter.ai to transcribe what you and I are talking about. So, and I have to go through and edit it a little bit but the editing process is pretty good pretty easy. It just plays in your headphones or whatever and, and you just type in errors and stops if you type in something or you know if you edit something. So it’s, it’s pretty good as long as you got a good microphone. It’s pretty accurate.
Mark 5:23
I have so much fun reading some SMS messages where the autocorrect puts in a completely different word.
Seamus 5:29
Yeah and the same with this, you still have to edit it’s not 100%. There’s another mob called rev.com, and they charge $1.25 US a minute, I think, to record anything, any recording ah sorry to transcribe any recording and they’re 100% accurate because they actually pay people, I think peanuts but they pay people to actually verify or transcribe for you.
Mark 6:00
So they are the proofreaders.
Seamus 6:04
It’s probably 99% accurate. Whereas, I’d say the, you know, artificial intelligence ones are 70% – 80%
Mark 6:18
I know myself trying to get a quorum, at a club meeting at times can be an absolute pain, nothing is done this way, you have a Zoom meeting everyone’s you know just finished dinner or something they could go into the meeting, and then you’ve actually got a record you’ve got everything else like that it sounds like it’s gonna be a game-changer for a lot of, I suppose voluntary clubs and sporting clubs and things like that as well.
Seamus 6:42
I think it is yeah, I belong to this volunteer organisation called Startup & Innovation Tablelands. We hardly ever have physical meetings anymore because we’re all over the Tablelands and so we record all our meetings and we do it as we do them in Zoom. So we’ve got that recorded but we also have a Google Doc up and one person takes notes but all of us can edit the Google Doc at the same time. So it’s an incredibly efficient way to run meetings, and of course, you know, if you get to the stage where someone said, Well, I didn’t say that. You can go back and find what they said.
Mark 7:25
Because I do know a lot once again meetings – what’s the first thing you do you look at the minutes of the previous meetings to bring up any problems so if someone says didn’t say that yes you did. You’ve got the actual physical proof.
Seamus 7:36
Yeah, that’s correct. And then to be able to transcribe them to find things quickly is even more powerful, I think, so that the Otter one does it for you if you’ve got business Zoom, but their free version if you haven’t got a business Zoom, gives you 600 minutes of transcription minutes per month that’s 10 hours a month which is a lot that they give you for free.
Mark 8:12
That is a lot when you consider what was the meeting normally take about two hours, three hours if you’re got a lot to go through.
Seamus 8:21
Yeah, we limit as to an hour, but yeah it’s still a really amazing free offer I think. They’ve got paid versions which offer more transcription options, but and also more transcription minutes per month. But the free one will do most people. And then there’s another one, which is quite interesting called fireflies.ai. And that’s actually a service, not an app so you sign up to fireflies.ai. It asks you to connect to whatever calendar you use, and it then looks through your calendar for any meeting you’ve got that’s got a Zoom link in it. And it actually invites itself, it asked you if it can come to your meeting. So, one of your meeting attendees is fireflies.ai, which looks quite funny so this little bot sitting at your meeting recording, as you go. Now, the free version of fireflies.ai only records so it’s not that valuable because Zoom records stuff anyway. But the pro version which is about Australian $15 per month. That allows you transcriptions as well in a similar manner to Otter – quite efficient and quite easy to do. And you can then obviously search through your meetings and Otter also will do keywords for a meeting, it’ll automatically pick the words that he thinks are the most important in your transcription.
Mark 10:04
It’s pretty amazing when you consider that – would this jump in technology and video technology really have happened if we hadn’t had the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you think it would have been as far as advanced is now?
Seamus 10:18
No, I don’t think so the transcriptions always been a bit of a holy grail for software companies. DragonSpeaking is one that’s been around for a long, long time. That’s quite expensive because it’s really hard to do good transcription, particularly when there’s more than one person. So I think it really boomed with this, you know, the COVID-19 because we just needed it quicker than before. So yeah, I think it’s, yeah it’s really pushed some of these businesses or these companies to produce something really quickly and it’s obviously worth it for them to do research and development into making these transcription services work really well.
Mark 11:06
I think when you take a look at that if you ever look at government because through government and the Zoom meeting, the federal government is one you’ve now seen the cessation of COAG, and you’ve now got the premiers and the ministers meeting, and the Prime Ministers meeting once a week via Zoom, it’s making it so much more convenient when you don’t have to do all that travelling.
Seamus 11:28
Yeah, I think it having, you need a flexible arrangement where some meetings, you do need to have physically about an awful lot of meetings, you can do virtually, and for an awful lot of them it’s much more efficient you know you got the recording you’ve got people there you’re not clogging up the roads with traffic and polluting the world. You save so much time. And I think you know some of the Aboriginal Corporations in the Cape – a lot of them have to, you know, come down to Cairns to have a meeting. That’s really expensive whereas, as long as a good, good reception which obviously is not always the case in Outback Queensland. But it’s a way that they can, you know, have really good meetings and save a bit of money and stop the travel and the hotels that they need to stay in Cairns.
Mark 12:25
Of course, we’ve now been easing a restriction that a lot of those meetings what I believe was done over the internet for Mayors and the local disaster management groups meeting up over Zoom or a platform similar to that, with ministers and with health ministers and with, and this seems to be something that’s going to really take off and become just a normal part of our life.
Seamus 12:48
I believe so yeah I think this is a trigger to make people realise that you can do so much more virtually. And I think also, there’ll be an increase in remote working or totally remote or totally distributed companies where you don’t actually have a central office. Everyone works from wherever from home.
Mark
but it’s gonna be very very interesting especially with these events are coming on but Seamus, we are going to run out of time.
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