Can Verbit Replace Verbatim?

I had had some thoughts with regard to AI and stenography. I stand by what I said there. Verbit has been, according to online commentators, soliciting people’s business and offering to assist with their workload. There are even some who have said — though I have not seen documentary proof of this — that Veritext is using Verbit or a similar process for their digital reporters. Succinctly, running the audio through a computer program and having a human fix up what the computer spits out. Oddly enough, sounds a lot like what we do when we are taking down every word on a stenotype these days.

The bottom line is these companies are hungry for money. They need revenue to prove to their investors that they are a good investment. Verbit reportedly raised $23 million. Trint reportedly raised at least 150 million euros, or 168 million dollars. That should give you an idea of just how big of an expense it is — in their estimation — to create a program to do what we already do.

When we talk about solving problems, and specifically solving problems with AI and computers, two of the largest jumps in technology are machine learning and modeling the human brain. Modeling the human brain seems an arduous task that is difficult to do on modern hardware. Machine learning is giving the computer training data, and then having the computer make “educated” guesses based on the training data.

So why bring this up again? Well, to caution all of us. The simple truth is the more training data that you give these folks, meaning the more audio files they have that show the computer what we do, the more they’ll be able to sculpt the program. If you make the business decision to help them in that way, that’s fine. But you know what? Demand a premium! There are hundreds of millions of dollars involved in developing these computer programs right now. They should probably be paying YOU to transcribe YOUR work, because quite frankly, if they perfect the program, you might be out of business. If they haven’t yet perfected the program, you’re helping them perfect it! Sounds like a premium service to me.

So make sure everybody out there knows: They don’t want your business, they need it, and they should probably be paying you.