vivdunstan

After battling to hear and understand the whispered Sea Devil dialogue in a Big Finish audio yesterday a friend kindly suggested that I try an auto transcription service. I've just been trying MacWhisper, which I can run locally on my Mac, no uploading the audio, which I wouldn't be happy with for copyright reasons. And it's done surprisingly well. The large AI audio model (available with a one-off pro purchase) copes best of all. But even the free small model was pretty impressive. Couldn't catch all the Sea Devil dialogue, but still did way better than me. I've now tried it with me blethering at it, and then also transcribing the audio for my 11 minutes talk about my gggg-granddad, Dandie Dinmont Terrier breeder Francis Somner. I'm really impressed with how it managed that last test, the large audio model especially. It even coped with many of the Scottish place names and counties, albeit not all. Definitely a higher level of accuracy than Apple's own internal dictation facility. So yup, I think I will find it useful. Though it was essential that it run locally on my Mac. And for once I am really grateful that I have an extremely whizzy Mac processor wise. Because I really needed it here!

P.S. I never had a script for this talk. I just burbled my way through it, using the PowerPoint slides as my prompts. It is remarkably free of ums and ahs!

IFComp have today added new questions that authors must answer about any use of AI generated content in their works for the imminent competition. I was very pleased to be able to tick the “no AI” option for my game. Not even for the cover art, which I did myself. I am not at all a fan of the use of AI in creative fields like this, whether for text content or art. The human cost to creatives working for a living in these areas is too great, as is the environmental cost of running generative AI queries.