The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 9th Edition

7Artificial Intelligence for Marketing and PR

As I write this chapter, I'm using web-based artificial intelligence (AI) transcription software called Otter to help me turn recorded audio interviews into a text transcripts. I conduct interviews either in person or on Zoom while speaking with subjects for research, recording the audio of the conversations, which enables me to focus on what the other person is saying. This approach helps me ask better follow-up questions, since I'm not distracted by the need to produce accurate notes to pull quotes from later.

I upload these audio files to the app, and then Otter's speech-to-text algorithms quickly generate a quality first-pass transcript of the interview. To ensure that quotes are accurate, I proofread and edit the transcript by simultaneously listening to the original audio and following along in the written transcript.

Behind the scenes, Otter'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.

After the transcript is created, I often head over to ChatGPT, the generative AI service from the company OpenAI. In that app, I upload parts of the transcript and enter a prompt, asking the tool to summarize the discussion. A prompt is how humans interact with a chatbot like ChatGPT, providing a natural language question ...