“我们并不认为在几分钟的访谈中，这样的转录结果是完美的，”Trint的首席执行官杰夫·考夫曼（Jeff Kofman）说。“但是，只要有高质量音频，它就能接近完美。你可以搜索、重听、查错，就能在几秒内知道究竟说了什么。”

“We don’t claim that this turnaround in a couple of minutes of an interview like this is perfect,” says Jeff Kofman, Trint’s CEO. “But, with good audio, it can be close to perfect. You can search it, you can hear it, you [can] find the errors, and you know within seconds what was actually said.”

考夫曼表示，Trint的绝大多数用户都是记者，其次是定性研究的研究员以及商界和医疗保健客户——换句话说，都是需要在严格的规定时间内完成大量音频转录的职业。这与SwiftScribe的开发者Ryan Prenger和他的同事们收集到的匿名用户行为数据相一致。虽然Prenger推测有一些长尾用户，他们只是渴望测试SwiftScribe能力的人工智能爱好者，但他也看到一些日常使用该程序转录语音的“超级用户”。随着ASR技术的不断改进，他对该技术能够吸引的用户范围感到乐观。

According to Kofman, most of the people using Trint are journalists, followed by academics doing qualitative research and clients in business and healthcare—in other words, professions expected to transcribe a large volume of audio on tight deadlines. That’s in keeping with the anonymized data on user behavior being collected by the developer Ryan Prenger and his colleagues at SwiftScribe. While there is a long tail of users who Prenger speculates are simply AI enthusiasts eager to test out SwiftScribe’s capabilities, he’s also spotted several “power users” that are running audio through the program on almost a daily basis. It’s left him optimistic about the range of people the tool could attract as ASR technology continues to improve.

“这就是转录技术的一般情况，”Prenger说，“一旦精确度突破一定范围，所有人都有可能开始转录，至少在前几轮。”他预测，最终自动转录技术能够提升对转录工作的需求和供给。“未来可能会出现一个良性循环，更多人期望他们的音频能够被转录，因为快速转录将变得低价、方便。而且，它将成为转录一切的标准。”

“That’s the thing with tranion technology in general,” says Prenger. “Once the accuracy gets above a certain bar, everyone will probably start doing their tranions that way, at least for the first several rounds.” He predicts that, ultimately, automated tranion tools will increase both the supply of and the demand for trans. “There could be a virtuous circle where more people expect more of their audio that they produce to be transcribed, because it’s now cheaper and easier to get things transcribed quickly. And so, it becomes the standard to transcribe everything.”

未来，Trint将有意识地进行拓展。该公司刚刚募集到310万美元的种子基金，用于下一轮扩张。考夫曼和他的团队计划本月底在维也纳举行的全球编辑网络峰会上，展示该技术的能力。他们的目标是在峰会主题发言结束一小时内，将转录结果发布在《华盛顿邮报》的网站上。

It’s a future that Trint is consciously maneuvering itself to exploit. The company just?raised $3.1 million in seed money?to fund its next round of expansion. Kofman and his team plan to demonstrate its capabilities later this month at the Global Editors Network in Vienna. Their aim is to have the tranion of the event’s keynote address up on the?Washington Post’s website within the hour.

虽然人们预计会出现错误，但仍然难以准确预测这次转录结果将会如何。速记员很有可能像小贩和售冰员一样，进入被遗忘的职业行列。在辅助写作工具的协助下，记者可以花更多时间进行报道和写作，侦探可以更早地分析出犯罪嫌疑人证言中的矛盾。YouTube上的视频字幕将标准化，大量听障人士能够接触到广播节目和播客。与熟人、朋友、旧情人的通话能够像社交软件和电子邮件一样存档、搜索，也能被执法部门拦截、存储。

It’s difficult to predict precisely what this new order could look like, although casualties are expected. The stenographer would likely join the ranks of the costermonger?and the?iceman?in the list of forgotten professions. Journalists could spend more time reporting and writing, aided by a?plethora of assistive writing tools, while detectives could analyze the contradictions in suspect testimony earlier. Captioning on YouTube videos could be standard, while radio shows and podcasts could become accessible to the hard of hearing on a mass scale. Calls to acquaintances, friends, and old flames could be archived and searched in the same way that social-media messages and emails are, or intercepted and hoarded by law-enforcement agencies.