Digits were read simultaneously.
Yeah.
Um, so.
If we can't, we can't. But uh we're gonna try to make this an abbreviated meeting cuz the -
the next - next occupants were pushing for it, so.
Um.
So.
Agenda is - according to this, is transcription status, DARPA demos
X_M_L tools, disks, backups, et cetera
and CrossPads.
Does anyone have anything to add to the agenda?
O_K.
Should we just go in order? Transcription status? Who's - that's probably you.
I can do that quickly. Um I hired several more transcribers, They're making great progress. Seve- several, several.
Seven?
Oh.
And uh -
and uh,
uh I've been uh finishing up the uh double checking.
I hoped to have had that done by today but it's gonna take one more week.
Um
I g-
as a somewhat segue into the next topic, um
could I get a hold of uh
the data even if it's not really corrected yet just so I can get the data formats
and make sure the information retrieval stuff is working?
Certainly. Yeah I mean, it's in the same place it's been.
So can you just -
Oh, it is. O_K. Just - So, "transcripts"
Uh-huh. No change.
Uh -
is the sub-directory?
Yes. Uh-huh.
O_K.
So I'll - I'll probably just make some copies of those rather than use the ones that are there.
O_K.
Um and then
just - we'll have to remember to
delete them once the corrections are made.
O_K.
O_K, wh-
I also got anot- a short remark to the transcription. I've uh just processed the first five E_D_U meetings and they are chunked up so they would - they probably can be sent to I_B_M
whenever they want them.
Well the second one of those
Cool.
Yep. It's already at I_B_M, but the other ones - Yeah.
is already at I_B_M.
That's the one that we're waiting to hear from them on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
O_K.
These are separate from the ones that - I mean, these are -
As soon as -
They're the I_B_M set.
It's this one.
Yep.
Excellent. Good.
Yeah.
Is my mike on? Yeah.
And so as soon as we hear
from Brian
that
this one is O_K and we get the transcript back and we find out that
hopefully there are no problems matching up the transcript
with what we gave
them,
then uh we'll be ready to go and we'll just send them the next four as a big batch,
Excellent.
and let them work on that.
And so we're doing those as disjoint from the ones we're transcribing here?
Yes, exactly. We're sort of doing things in parallel, that way we can get as much done a- at once. Yeah.
O_K, good.
Yeah, I think that's the right way to do it, especially for the information retrieval stuff.
Anything else on transcription status?
Hm-mmm.
O_K.
DARPA demos, we had the submeeting the other day.
Right, which uh -
So I've been working on using the THISL tools to do information retrieval on meeting data
and the THISL tools are -
there're two sets, there's a back-end and a front-end, so the front-end is the user interface and the back-end is the indexing tool and the querying tool.
And so I've written some tools to convert everything into the right for- file formats.
And the
command line version of the indexing and the querying is now working.
So at least on the one meeting that I had the transcript for
uh conveniently you can now do information retrieval on it, do - type in a - a string and get back a list of start-end times for the meeting,
uh of hits.
What - what kind of uh - what does that look like? The string that you type in. What are you - are you - are they keywords, or are they - ? O_K.
Keywords.
I see.
Right? And so - and then it munges it to pass it to the THISL I_R which uses an S_G_M_L-like
format for everything.
I see.
And then
does it play something back or that's something you're having to program?
Um, right now, I have a tool that will do that on a command line using our standard tools,
Yeah.
but my intention is to do a prettier user interface based either -
So - so that's the other thing I wanted to discuss, is well what should we do for the user interface? We have
two tools that have already been written. Um the SoftSound guys did a web-based one,
Mm-hmm.
um, which I haven't used, haven't looked at. Dan says it's pretty good
Mm-hmm.
but it does mean you need to be running a web server.
Mm-hmm.
And so it - it's pretty big and complex.
Uh and it would be difficult to port to Windows because it means porting the web server to Windows.
Mm-hmm.
Uh the other option is Dan did the Tcl-T_K THISL GUI front-end
Yeah.
for Broadcast News which I think looks great. I think that's a nice demo.
Um and that would be much easier to port to Windows.
And so I think that's the way we should go.
I - Can I ask a question? So um
Mm-hmm.
as it stands within the - the Channeltrans interface, it's possible to do a find and a play.
You can find a searched string and play. So e- Are you - So you're adding like um,
I don't know, uh are they fuzzy matches or are they uh - ?
It's a sort of standard,
text-retrieval-based -
So it's uh term frequency, inverse document frequency scoring.
O_K.
Um
and then there are all sorts of metrics for spacing how far apart they have to be and things like that.
So it - it's
It's a lot more sophisticated than the uh
i-
it's like doing a Google query or anyth- anything else like that.
the basically Windows-based -
So i- it uses - So it pr- produces an index ahead of time so you don't - you're not doing a linear search through all the documents.
O_K.
Cuz you can imagine if - with - if we have the sixty hours' worth you do - wouldn't wanna do a search.
Hm-mmm.
Um you have to do preindexing and so that - these tools do all that.
Good.
And so the work to get the front-end to work would be porting it -
well -
uh to get it to work on the UNIX systems, our side is just
rewriting them and modifying them
to work for meetings. So that it understands that they're different speakers and that it's one big audio file instead of a bunch of little ones and just
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
sorta things like that.
Mm-hmm.
So what does the user see as the result of the query?
On which tool?
THISL.
The THISL GUI tool which is the one that Dan wrote, Tcl-T_K
Yeah.
um you type in a query and then you get back a list
of hits
and you can type on them and listen to them.
Click on them rather with a mouse.
Ah.
So if you typed in "small heads" or something you could
Mmm
Right, you'd get -
get back a uh uh
something -
something that would let you click and listen to some audio where that phrase had occurred or some-
You - you'd get to listen to "beep".
That was a really good look. It's too bad that that couldn't come into the -
You couldn't get a video.
Guess who I practice on?
At some point we're gonna have to say what that private joke is, that keeps coming up.
Yeah.
And then again, maybe not. So, uh -
Yeah, that soun- that sounds reasonable. Yeah, it loo- it - my - my recollection of it is it's - it's a pretty reasonable
Right.
uh demo sort of format.
Yeah that sounds good. That sounds really neat.
And so I think
there'd be minimal effort to get it to work, minimally and then we'd wanna add things like query by speaker and by meeting and all that sort of stuff.
Um Dave Gelbart expressed some interest in working on that so I'll work with him on it.
And it - it's looking pretty good, you know, the fact that I got the query system working.
So if we wanna just do a video-based one I think that'll be easy.
Mm-hmm.
If we wanna get it to Windows it's gonna be a little more work because the
THISL
I_R, the information retrieval tool's - um, I had difficulty just compiling them on Solaris.
Mm-hmm.
So getting them to compile on
Windows might be challenging.
Mm-hmm.
But you were saying that - that the uh -
So.
that there's that set of tools, uh, Cygnus tools, that -
It certainly helps. Um, I mean without those I wouldn't even attempt it.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
But what those - they - what those do is provide sort of a B_S_D compatibility layer,
so that the normal UNIX function calls all work.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Um,
And you have to have all the o-
But the problem is that - that the THISL tools didn't use anything like Autoconf
and so you have the normal porting problems of
different header files and th- some things are defined and some things aren't
and uh
different compiler work-arounds and so on. So the fact that
um it took me a day to get it c- to compile under Solaris means it's probably gonna take me
s- significantly more than that to get it to compile under Windows.
How about having it run under free B_S_D?
Well what you need -
Free B_S_D would probably be easier.
All you need to do is say to Dan
"gee it would be nice if this worked under Autoconf " and it'll be done in a day.
That's true.
Right?
Uh -
Actually you know I should check because he did port it to SPRACHcore
so he might have done that already.
Right.
I - I - I wouldn't be surprised.
So -
I'll check at that -
How does it play?
What I -
But it would - what would serve - would serve both purposes, is if you contact him and ask him if he's already done it.
Yeah, right.
If he has then you learn, if he hasn't then he'll do it.
Right.
Wow.
I hope he never listens to these meetings.
That's right.
So, and I've been corresponding with Dan and also with uh
It's amazing.
Yeah.
uh,
SoftSound guy, uh -
Blanking on his name.
Tony Robinson?
Tony Robinson?
Do I mean Tony? I guess I do.
Yeah.
Or S- or Steve Renals.
James Christie.
Which one do I mean?
Steve Renal- Steve Renals.
Steve Renals is not SoftSound, is he?
No.
My brain is not working, I don't remember who I've been corresponding with.
O_K.
Steve wro- i- it's Ste- Steve Renals wrote
THISL I_R.
Then it's Steve Renals.
O_K.
Oh, O_K.
So uh just getting documentation and uh and f- and formats, so that's all going pretty well, I think we'll be O_K with that.
Yeah.
Right.
Assuming we're -
What about issues of playing sound files @@ between the two platforms?
Um
we have -
Well, that's a good point too.
Here's a - here's a crazy idea actually.
I don't know.
Why don't you try and merge Transcriber and THISL I_R?
Well this is one of the reasons -
They're both Tcl interfaces.
This is the - one of the reasons that I'm gonna have uh Dave Gelbart - Gelbart -
Having him volunteer to work on it is a really good thing
because he's worked on the Transcriber stuff
Right.
and he's more familiar with Tcl-T_K than I am.
And then you get - they - then you get the Windows media playing for free.
Well that's Snack, not - not Transcriber.
Right. But the point is that the Transcriber uses Snack and then you can - but you can use a - a lot of the same functionality and it's -
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I - I think THISL - THISL GUI probably uses Snack.
And so my intention was just to base it on that.
Yeah.
Well my thought was is that it would be nice - it would be nice to have the running transcripts
And if it doesn't -
um eh you know, from speaker to speaker.
Right? Do you have - you have, you know, a speaker mark here and a speaker mark here?
Right, we'll have to figure out a user interface for that, so.
Right.
Well that - eh my thought was if you had like Multitrans or whatever
do it.
Or whatever.
Yeah.
It might be fairly difficult to get that to work in
the little short segments we'd be talking about and having
the search tools and so on. We - we can look into it, but -
Yeah.
The thing I was asking about with, um, free B_S_D is that it might be easier to
get PowerPoint shows
running in free B_S_D than to get this other package running in -
Yeah, I mean we have to - I have to sit down and try it before I make too many judgments, so uh
Yeah.
Um
My experience with the Gnu compatibility library is really
it's just as hard and just as easy to port to any system.
Right? The Windows system isn't any harder because it - it looks like a B_S_D system.
Mm-hmm.
It's just, you know, just like all of them, the "include" files are a little different and the function calls are a little different.
Right.
So I - it might be a little easier but it's not gonna be a lot easier.
O_K.
So there was that demo, which was one of the main ones, then we talked about
um some other stuff which would basically be
um showing off the - the Transcriber interface itself and as you say, maybe we could even merge those in some sense, but - but um,
uh - and part of that was showing off what the speech-non- uh nonspeech stuff that Thilo has done s- looks like.
Yeah.
Can I ask one more thing about THISL?
Mm-hmm.
So with the I_R stuff then you end up with a somewhat prioritized um - ?
Mm-hmm, ranked.
Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah.
So another idea I w- t- had
just now actually for the demo was
whether it might be of interest to sh- to show some of the prosody uh
work that Don's been doing.
Mm-hmm.
Um actually show some of the features and then show for instance a task like finding sentence boundaries or finding turn boundaries.
Um,
you know, you can show that graphically, sort of what the features are doing. It, you know, it doesn't work great but it's definitely giving us something.
Well I think at -
I don't know if that would be of interest or not.
at the very least we're gonna want something illustrative with that cuz I'm gonna want to talk about it and so i- if there's something that shows it graphically
Yeah.
it's much better than me just having a bullet point
pointing at something I don't know much about, so.
I mean, you're looking at this now - Are you looking at Waves or Matlab?
Um yeah I'm starting to and
um -
Yeah we can probably find some examples
of different type of prosodic
Yeah def-
events going on.
S- so when we here were having this demo meeting, what we're sort of coming up with is that we wanna have all these pieces together, to first order, by the end of the month
I-
and then that'll give us a week or so.
Oh, the end of this month or next month?
Ooo. The end of -
This month.
Oh, you mean like today?
Ju-
Oh.
Oh sorry, next month. Today isn't June first, is it.
June. June. June.
Next month. Sorry. O_K.
Yeah.
There's another one.
Exactly.
Uh -
that'll - that'll give us -
Sorry.
that'll give us a week or so to uh - to port things over to my laptop and make sure that works, yeah.
I think, I mean eh where -
Yeah, I mean I'll be here.
Yeah if d- if Don can sort of talk to whoever's - cuz we're doing this anyway as part of our -
Yeah.
you know, the research, visualizing what these features are doing and so either -
Yeah.
it might not be integrated but it -
it could potentially be in it.
Could find some.
Yeah. Well, this is to an audience of researchers so I mean, you know,
to let s- the goal is to let them know what it is we're doing. So that's -
I mean it's different.
I don't think anyone has done this on meeting data so it might be neat, you know.
Yeah.
Good.
Done with that.
X_M_L tools?
Um.
So I've been doing a bunch of X_M_L tools where you - we're sort of moving to X_M_L as the
general format for everything and I think that's definitely the right way to go because there are a lot of tools
that let you do extraction and reformatting of X_M_L tools.
Um.
So yet again we should probably meet to talk about transcription formats in X_M_L because I'm not particularly happy with what we have now.
I mean it works with Transcriber but it - it's a pain to use it in other tools
uh because it doesn't mark start and end.
Start and end of each - ?
Uh -
Yeah.
Utterance.
Utterance. Just marks - ?
So it's implicit in - in there but you have to do a lot of processing to get it.
Yeah.
Right. Right.
And so - and also I'd like to do the indirect time line business.
Um but regardless, I mean, w- that's something that you, me, and Jane can talk about later. Um,
but I've installed X_M_L tools of various sorts in various languages and so if people are interested in doing -
extracting any information from any of these files, either uh information on
users because the user database is that way -
I'm converting the Key files to X_M_L so that you can extract m- uh
Cool.
various inf- uh sorted information on individual meetings
Yeah.
and then also the transcripts. And so l- just let me know there - it's mostly Java and Perl
but we can get other languages too if - if that's desirable.
Oh, quick question on that. Is - do we have the - the seat information?
In - in the Key files now?
Mm-hmm.
The seat information is on the Key files for the ones which
Ah.
Oh in -
it's been recorded, yeah.
For the new one- O_K. Great.
Seat?
Sea- yeah.
Where - where you're sitting.
Oh! Not - not the quality or anything. No. O_K. I see.
n-
Right. "It's pretty soft and squishy."
Yeah.
Alright .
Yeah.
O_K.
Oh, but that might just be me.
O_K.
Um.
Alright.
That's more seat information than we wanted.
Never mind.
Hmm.
I'm just trying to figure out, you know, when Morgan's voice appears on someone's microphone are they next to him or are they across from him?
Maybe we should bleep that out.
Yeah.
Mmm, yeah.
Wait a minute, how - how w- eh where is it in the Key file?
Right.
Yeah.
The square bracket.
Cuz
I mean I haven't been putting it in and - in by -
You haven't been putting it in.
Right. I have not. And -
Well bu-
Oh, O_K.
Isn't it always on the digits?
Some of these are missing. Aren't they?
Isn't it always on the digits forms?
Some fall out of -
Well it-
Yeah so we can go back and fill them in for the ones we have.
Ooo.
I mean they're on th- right, these, but I just hadn't ever been putting it in the Key files. And I don't think Chuck was either cuz -
Yeah I - I never -
I never knew we were supposed to put it in the Key file.
I had told you guys about it but -
Oh, so we're both sorry. So -
Oh really?
I mean this is why I wanna use a g- a tool to do it rather than the plain text because with the plain text it's very easy to skip those things.
O_K.
O_K.
O_K.
So.
Um if you use the Edit-key,
or Key-edit - I think it's Edit-key,
Edit-key.
command -
Did I show you guys that?
Yep.
I did show it to you, but I think you both said "no, you'll just use
You mentioned it, yeah. Yeah.
text file". Um it has it in there, a place to fill it in.
Text.
O_K.
O_K.
Yeah, and so if you don't fill it in, you're not gonna get it in the meetings. So.
So if -
Right. Well I - I just realized I hadn't been doing it and probably - So -
Yep.
u-
Yeah and then the other thing also that Thilo noticed is, on the microphone,
on channel zero it says hand-held mike or Crown mike,
Yeah.
Right.
you actually have to say which one. So.
I know - Yeah, I usually delete the -
I don't, maybe I forgot to d-
Oh! O_K. I didn't do that either.
Yeah.
Takes me no time at all to edit these.
But it's almost -
Yeah.
Yeah that's cuz you kn- I - I know why.
I'm not doing anything.
And I was - I was looking at Chuck's, like, "oh what did Chuck do, O_K I'll do that ". So.
And then uh also in a couple of places instead of filling the participants under "participants" they were filled in under "description".
Ah, O_K.
Uh -
And so that's also a problem.
So anyway.
We will do better.
That's it.
Oh uh also I'm working on another version of this tool,
the - the one that shows up here,
that will flash yellow if the mike isn't connected.
And it's not quite ready to go yet because um
it's hard to tell whether the mike's connected or not because
the best quality ones, the Crown ones,
are about the same level if they're off
and no one's o- off or if they're on and no one's talking.
Huh.
Um these - these ones, they
are much easier, there's a bigger difference.
So I'm working on that and it - it sorta works and so eventually we will change to that and then you'll be able to see graphically if your mike is dropping in or out.
Will that also include like batteries dying?
Yep.
Just a- any time the mike's putting out zeros basically.
Yep.
Yep.
But with the screensaver kicking in, it -
Now -
But y- yeah.
Well I'll turn off the screensaver too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oops. Speaking of which.
Um the other thing is as I've said before, it is actually on
the thing. There's a little level meter
but of course no one ever pays attention to it. So I think having it on the screen
is more easy to notice.
It would be nice if - if these had little light indicators, little L_E_Ds for -
Uh buzzer. "Bamp, bamp!"
Yeah, a buzzer.
Small shocks
administered to the -
Yeah.
Actually -
O_K.
Oh -
O_K, disk backup, et cetera?
Um I spoke with Dave Johnson about putting all the Meeting Recorder stuff on non-backed-up disk to save the overhead of backup
and he pretty much said "yeah, you could do that if you want"
but he thought it was a bad idea.
In fact what he said is
doing the manual one,
doing uh N_W archive to copy it
is a good idea
and we should do that and have it backed up.
He w- he's a firm believer in - in lots of different modalities of backup.
I mean, his point was well taken. This data cannot be recovered.
Yeah.
And so if a mistake is made and we lose the backup
we should have the archive and if then a mistake is made and we lose the archive we should have the backup.
Well I guess it is true that even with something that's backed up it's
not gonna -
if it's stationary it's not going to go through the increment- it's not gonna burden things in the incremental backups.
Just - just the monthly full.
Hmm.
Yeah, so the monthly full will be a bear but -
Yeah. But he said
that -
that we sh-
shouldn't worry too much about that,
that we're getting a new backup system and we're far enough away from saturation on full backups that it's w-
Really?
probably O_K.
And uh, so the only issue here is the timing between
getting more disks and
uh
recording meetings.
So I guess the idea is that we would be reserving the
non-backed-up space for things
that took less than twenty-four hours to recreate or something like that, right?
Things that are recreatable easily and also - Yeah, basically things that are recreatable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The expanded files and things like that.
O_K .
They take up a lot more room anyway.
Yeah.
Uh but we do need more disk.
So we can get more disk. Yeah. So.
Yeah.
And I - I think I agree with him. I mean his point was well taken that
if we lose one of these we cannot get it back.
O_K.
I don't think there was any other et cetera there.
Well I was allowing someone else to come up with something related that they had uh -
I thought you guys were gonna burn C_Ds?
Um unfortunately - we could burn C_Ds but first of all it's a pain.
Yeah.
Because you have to copy it down to the P_C and then
burn it and that's a multi-step procedure.
And second of all the - the write-once burners as opposed to a professional press don't last.
Yeah.
So I think burning them for distribution is fine
but burning them for backup is not a good idea.
I see.
Cuz th- they - they
O_K.
fail after a couple years.
Alright.
I do have uh uh - It's a different topic. Can I add one top- topic? We have time?
I wanted to ask, I know that uh that Thilo you were, um,
bringing the Channeltrans interface onto the Windows machine?
Yeah it's - it - Basically it's done, yeah.
And I wanted to know is th-
It's all done? That's g- wonderful. Great.
Yeah.
Yes, since Tcl-T_K runs on it, basically
Yeah it -
things'll just work.
Yeah, it was just a problem with the Snack version and the Transcriber version but
it's solved. So.
Does - and that - does that mean, I -
maybe I should know this but I don't. Does this mean that the - that this could be por- uh ported to a Think-Pad note- or some other type of uh -
Yeah, basically uh I
did install it on my laptop and yeah
Wonderful.
it worked.
Hmm!
Wonderful.
Good.
CrossPads?
Uh got an email from uh
James Landay who basically said "if you're not using them,
could you return them?"
So he said he doesn't need them, he just
periodically w- at the end of each term sends out email to everyone who was recorded as having them
and asks them if they're still using them.
So we've never used them.
We used them once.
We - we used them a couple times, but -
Once?
Mm-hmm.
Them? There's more than one?
Couple times.
Yeah, we have two.
Yeah.
i-
Um.
But -
My opinion on it is, first, I never take notes anyway
so I'm not gonna use it,
um and second, it's another level of infrastructure that we have to deal with.
And I have - uh so my - my feeling on it is that I think in principle it's a really nice idea, and you have the time tags which makes it better tha- than just taking ra- raw notes. On the other hand,
I - the down side for me was that
I think the pen is really noisy.
So you have ka- kaplunk, kaplunk, kaplunk.
And I - and I don't know if it's audible on the -
but I - I sort of thought that was a disadvantage. I do take notes, I mean, I could be taking notes on these things and I guess the plus with the CrossPads would be the time markings but -
I don't know.
Uh, what is a CrossPad?
So it's - it's um - it's a regular pad, just a regular pad of paper but there's this pen
Thank you.
which indicates position.
And so you have time and position
O_K.
stuff stored so that you can - you have a record of whatever it is you've written.
O_K.
And then you can download it and they have O_C_R and searching and all sorts of things.
O_K.
O_K.
So i- if you take notes it's a great little device.
Could - Mm-hmm.
But I don't take notes, so.
And one of the reasons that it was brought up originally was because uh we were interested in - in higher-level things, not just the, you know, microphone stuff but also summarization and
so forth and the question is if you were going to go to some gold standard of what wa- what was it that happened in the meeting
you know, where would it come from? And um I think that was one of the
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
things, right? And so the - it seemed like a neat idea. We'll have a - you know, have a scribe,
have somebody uh take good notes and then that's part of the record of the meeting.
And then we did it once or twice and we sort of -
Yep, and then just sort of died out.
probably chose the wrong scribe but it was - It's uh -
I mean -
Yeah that's right.
Well I did it one time but um -
Yep.
Yeah.
u-
but I guess the - the other
thing I'm thinking is if we wanted that kind of thing I wonder if we'd
lose that much by having someone be a scribe by listening to the tape, to the recording afterwards and
taking notes in some other interface.
I mean we're transcribing it anyways, why do we need notes?
Oh it's la- it's useful, have a summary and high points.
Because that's summary.
I think -
Summary.
there's also -
there's this use that -
Summarize it from the transcription.
the -
Well, what if you're sitting there and you just wanna make an X_ and you don't wanna take notes and you're - you just wanna
Doodle.
get the summary of the transcript from this time location like -
you know, and - and then while you're bored you don't do anything and once in a while, maybe there's a joke and you put a X_ and -
But -
in - in other words you can use that just to highlight times
in a very simple way. Also with - I was thinking and I know Morgan disagrees with me on this but
suppose you have a group in here and you wanna let them note whenever they think there might be something later that they might not wanna distribute in terms of content,
they could just sort of
make an X_ near that point or a question mark that
sort of alerts them that when they get the transcript back they c-
could get some red flags in that transcript region and they can then look at it. So.
I know we haven't been using it but
I w-
I can imagine it being useful just for sort of marking time periods which you then
Right.
get back in a transcript so.
Well.
I guess -
so, you know, what - what makes one think i- is maybe we should actually schedule some periods where people go over something later and - and -
and put some kind of summary or something uh you know, some - there'd be some scribe
who would actually listen, w- who'd agreed to actually listen to the whole thing,
not transcribe it, but just sort of write down things that struck them as important.
But -
then you don't - you don't have
the time reference
Right.
uh that you'd have if you had it live.
And you don't have a lot of other cues that might be useful, so.
Yeah.
How do you synchronize the time in the CrossPad and the time of the recording?
I mean that was one of the issues we talked about originally and that- that's w-
part of the difficulty is that we need an infrastructure for using the time - the CrossPads and so that means synchronizing the time -
Uh.
Mm-hmm.
You know you want it pretty close and there's a fair amount of skew because it's a hand-held unit with a battery
Well when - when I d-
and so you -
O_K.
so you have to synchronize at the beginning of each meeting all the pads that are being used,
so that it's synchronized with the time on that and then you have to
download to an application, and then you have to
figure out what the data formats are and convert it over if you wanna do anything with this information.
w- Mm-hmm.
And so there's a lot of infrastructure which
Why -
There is an alternative.
unless someone -
There is an alternative, I mean, it's still, there's uh - you know, your point stands about there be - needing to be an infrastructure, but
it doesn't have to be synchronized with the little clock's timer on it. You c-
I mean, I - when I - when I did it I synchronized it by voice, by whispering "one, two, three, four" onto the microphone and uh, you know.
Hmm.
Well, but then there's the infrastructure at the other end which someone has to listen to that and find that point,
Right.
Yeah, it's transcribed. It's in the transcript.
and then mark it.
So.
Yeah.
Well it's in the transcript.
Well, could we keep one of these things for another year? Would h- I mean is there a big cau-
We can keep all - both of them for the whole whole year. I mean, it's just -
just - just in case we -
even maybe some of the transcribers who might be wanting to annotate
uh f- just there's a bunch of things that might be neat to do but I -
it might not be the case that we can actually
synchronize them and then do all the infrastructure but we could at least try it out.
Well -
one thing that we might try
um
is on some set of meetings, some collection of meetings, maybe E_D_U is the right one or maybe something else,
we - we get somebody to buy into the idea of doing this as part of the task. I mean,
Right.
uh part of the reason - I think part of the reason that Adam was so interested in uh the SpeechCorder sort of f- idea from the beginning is he said from the beginning he hated taking notes and -
Yep.
and so forth so and - and Jane is more into it but eh uh
you know I don't know if you wanna really do - do this all the time so I think the thing is to -
to get someone to actually buy into it and have at least some series of meetings where we do it.
Um -
and if so, it's probably worth having one.
The p- the - the problem with the - the more extended view, all these other you know with uh quibbling about particular
applications of it is that it looks like it's hard to get people to
um
uh routinely use it, I mean it just hasn't happened anyway.
But maybe if we can get a person to -
Yeah I don't think it has to be part of a- what everybody does in a meeting but it might be
a useful, neat
part of the project that we can, you know, show off as
a mechanism for synchronizing events in time
that happen that you just wanna make a note of, like what Jane was talking about
with some later browsing, just - just as a convenience, even if it's not a full-blown note taking
substitute.
Well if you wanted to do that maybe the right architecture for it is to get a P_D_A with a wireless card.
And - and that way you can synchronize very easily with the -
the - the meeting because you'll be synchroni- you can synchronize with the - the Linux server
and uh -
So what kind of input would you be - ?
so - so, I mean, if you're not worried about -
Buttons.
You'd just be pressing like a - a -
Well - well you have a P_D_A and may- and you could have the same sort of X_ interface or whatever, I mean, you'd have to do a little eh a little bit of coding to do it.
Mm-hmm.
But you could imagine, I mean, if - if all you really wanted was - you didn't want this
Yeah, that be good.
secondary note-taking channel but just sort of being able to use m- markers of some sort,
a P_D_A with a l- a wireless card would be the - probably the right way to go.
I mean even buttons you could do, sort of, I mean, as you said.
I mean for what - what you've been describing buttons would be even more convenient than anything else, right? You have the -
M- right.
That would be fine too. I mean, I don't have, you know, grandiose ideas in mind but I'm just sort of thinking
Right.
well we've - we're getting into the next year now and we have a lot of these things worked out at - in terms of the speech maybe somebody will be interested in this and -
I like this P_D_A idea. Yeah.
Yeah, I do like the idea of having a couple buttons where like one - one button was "uh-oh"
Well I'm sure there would -
Yeah.
Yeah.
and then another button was "that's great" and another button "that's f-"
Or like this is my "I'm supposed to do this" kind of button, like "I better remember to -"
Yeah.
Action item.
Yeah something like that or -
I mean I think the CrossPad idea is a good one.
And then -
Uh-huh.
It's just a question of getting people to use it and getting the infrastructure set up in such a way that it's not a lot of extra work.
I mean that's part of the reason why it hasn't happened is that
Yeah.
it's been a lot of extra work for me
Right.
and -
Well, and not just for you. But it's also, it has this problem of having to
W-
go from an analog to a d-
a digital record too, doesn't it? I mean -
Well it's digital but it's in a format that
But I mean, say, if i- if -
is not particularly standard.
if you're writing - if you're writing notes in it does - it - it can't do handwriting recognition, right?
No, no, but it's just - it's just storing the pixel
O_K.
informa- position information, it's all digital.
I - I guess what I'm thinking is that the P_D_A solution you h- you have it already without needing to go from the pixelization to a -
to a -
I mean -
Right.
You don't have to -
The transfer function is less errorful, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, nicely put.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well it also - it's maybe realistic cuz people are supposed to be bringing their P_D_As to the meeting eventually, right? That's why we have this little -
I don't know what - I don't wanna cause more work for anyone but I can imagine some interesting
things that you could do with it and so if we don't have to return it
and we can
keep it for a year - I don't know.
Well -
w- we don't - we certainly don't have to return it, as I said. All - all he said is that if you're not using it could you return it, if you are using it feel free to keep it.
The point is that we haven't used it at all and are we going to?
So we have no but - uh by I - I would suggest you return one.
O_K.
Yeah.
Because we - we you know, we - we haven't used it at all.
We c-
We have some aspirations of using them and -
One would probably be fine.
Maybe we could do like a student project, you know, maybe someone who wants to do this as their main like
Yeah.
s- project for something would be cool.
Yep.
I mean if we had them out and sitting on the table people might use them a little more
Maybe Jeremy could sit in some meetings and press a button when there - when - when somebody laughed.
although there is a little -
Well, I'm - yeah, that's not a bad -
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Jeremy's gonna be
an - he's a new student starting on modeling brea- breath and laughter, actually, which
sounds funny but I think it should be cool, so.
Yeah.
Sounds breathy to me.
O_K.
Breath and lau- "ha-ha-ha-ha".
"Ha-ha-ha."
"Ha-ha-ha-ha."
Well dear.
Um.
Hmm.
That reminded me of something. Oh well, too late.
It slipped out.
O_K.
Oh, equipment.
You're - you're gonna tease me? O_K.
Ordered - Uh, well I'm always gonna do that. W- uh -
We ordered uh more
wireless, and so they should be coming in at some point.
Great.
And then at the same time I'll probably rewire the room as per Jane's suggestion so that
uh the first N_ channels are wireless, eh are the m- the close-talking and the next N_ are far-field.
You know what he means but isn't that funny sounding? "We ordered more wireless. " It's like wires are the things so you're wiring - you're - you're - you - we're - we ordered more absence of the thing.
That's a very philosophical
statement from Morgan. I just - it's sort of a anachronism, I mean it's like -
wired less , wired more.
Anyway.
It's great.
Should we do digits? Do we have anything else?
Yeah.
O_K.
I mean there's - there's all this stuff going on uh between uh
Andreas and - and - and Dave and Chuck and others with various kinds of runs uh um -
recognition runs, trying to figure things out about the features but it's -
it's all sort of in process, so there's not much to say
right now.
Uh why don't we start with our - our esteemed guest.
O_K.
Alright.
So just the transcript number and then the - then the -
This is -
Yes, this is number two for me today.
See all you have to do is go away to move way up in the -
Oh.
We could do simultaneous.
Initiate him.
We - we could.
Should we do simultaneous?
Well, I'm just thinking, are you gonna try to save the data before this next group comes in?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so we might wanna do it simultaneous.
I mean you hav- sorta have to.
Right, so -
Well O_K, so let's do one of those simultaneous ones. That sounds good.
so we might n-
we might need to do that actually.
O_K.
O_K.
Everybody ready?
Yeah.
A one.
You have to plug your ears, by the way uh Eric, or -
Well I have to, I don't know about other people.
O_K, alright.
You don't have to.
or you start laughing.
O_K, a one and a two and a three.
Transcript L_ one six five.
Transcript L_ dash one six four.
Transcript L_ one six one.
Transcript L_ dash one six two.
Transcript L_ one sixty.
Transcript L_ one six six.
Transcript L_ one five nine.
L_ one six three.
zero, one six zero, two seven, six four seven, eight
zero nine six five, five, one five one
three O_, six nine, three nine, four six, nine seven
zero five, four eight, seven eight, eight seven, four five
five four six, eight one, three two seven two
three seven eight two, two three two five, nine five nine seven
two six four seven, five, two nine eight
five seven nine, five six, five O_ four one
two, two five five, eight nine, one eight two, six
three six five, O_ six, two three six seven
six zero six two, zero five four five, eight five four three
six four six one, three, three two two
six three one one, six eight five five, two two four three
six nine five nine, one, one one six
five two nine seven, nine seven seven one, five O_ two four
six four three, nine nine eight, three one nine two
O_ five, four O_, nine six, three seven, one O_
nine three seven, seven six, three nine four eight
four nine three, four zero two, five eight two
seven nine five, four four seven, four three four six
three zero one, four four, two one zero four
seven three five, six two two, zero two six four
five eight eight nine, nine, seven nine seven
six six nine, four nine, four four, O_ nine
four five, eight O_, four three, seven five, nine three
three seven, four one, eight seven, four O_ , two nine
one zero one two, eight, zero six five
Four, four eight six, five three, seven four five, two
six nine seventy four, eight, five seven two
four four, seven zero, five five, three zero, four three
O_ eight, six eight, nine, five one nine
three eight three eight, four, two four nine
six one seven, three O_ six, three three four nine
eight nine five, four three nine, O_ eight six
four three four nine, nine six six three, zero four four five
three two six two, eight eight three one, four two five one
O_ five one, three two, two O_ seven three
six five seven, six seven, two three three one
two five one, seven two three, four eight six
five five, five seven, eight eight, eight three, six three
six, two three seven, three two, nine seven five, one
seven one six three, four, five four four
eight one, one four, three zero, five four, seven five
nine, nine O_ two, three seven, eight three zero, eight
four seven five, two nine seven, seven four five one
zero seven seven, eight four, five six nine one
four nine three, O_ eight one, four five seven
three one three seven, six eight zero seven, three two four two
nine four, three two, one seven, seven six, six three
five five O_ five, three, two three five
seven two four, nine two, zero eight, seven three
nine, three six four, six three, nine six nine, six
five four seven O_, nine, nine seven four
six five five four, four three three three, O_ four two five.
zero six four four, O_ four O_ three, three eight nine zero
six five nine, two seven, two eight, one two.
eight two four, three two eight, two four zero nine
eight one six zero, four, O_ seven three
Sorry.
nine four two six, six nine eight five, five three four four.
three zero zero nine, seven, eight four two.
five four seven O_, nine, seven nine four
four four two, five one, nine eight two five.
two one four five, eight, four two six.
four four five, four nine, nine six six six.
Nine six, two three, four eight, eight eight, seven nine.
O_K, babble, take five.