The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 7th Edition

9Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Marketing and PR

As I write this, I’m using web-based artificial intelligence (AI) transcription software called Trint¹ to help me turn recorded audio interviews into a text transcription. As I researched new ideas for this edition of the book, I conducted interviews either in person or on the phone, recording those conversations on my iPhone. Recording the conversation allows me to focus on what my source is saying, so I can ask better follow-up questions. I’m not distracted by the need to produce accurate notes to pull quotes from later.

I upload these audio files from my iPhone to the app, and then Trint’s speech-to-text algorithms quickly generate a quality first-pass transcript of the interview. To ensure that quotes are accurate, I use Trint’s built-in editing software to simultaneously listen to the original audio and follow along in the written transcript. I can easily make necessary corrections and then download the final transcript.

Behind the scenes, Trint’s digital transcription starts with AI, including automated speech recognition and natural language processing. The software is tuned to interpret the sounds that make up human speech and then match those sounds to the corresponding word in its multi-language dictionary. Since the resulting transcript isn’t perfect, users’ corrections to first-pass transcripts are used to improve the Trint software and improve future accuracy (hence: “machine learning”).

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