We share this frustration. I am somewhat hard of hearing, and ESOL speaker unaccostumed to some of the accents bandied about. I often lip-read as a secondary cue (not quite consciously). Many of the phone and even face to face meetings @ 1CC are hard, hard hard to follow.

To make things worse, I often join in via phone. Sound quality, and people talking in low tones are pretty frustrating at times – luckily noone can see me strangling my pet cactus in NZ.

The tricky part is that you usually have to train this software, meaning that whoever I wanted to “transcribe” would have to spend a half-hour or so with my computer first – not sure if there’s a good way around this.

Which speech-to-text programs have you experimented with? Dragon Naturally Speaking (ver9) looks impressive, but I’ve never seen it in person. see video here: http://www.nuance.com/talk/

Live transcription of all phone conferences, presentations, and large group (>5 people) meetings would be the next most ideal – and either super expensive (hire professional service) or taking attention-time from someone else who should be participating in the meeting.

Having someone locally mouthing/speaking things as they come in over the phone kind of works, and also pulls two people (myself + kindhearted helper) away from the conversation. We’ve tried it and it’s better than nothing for things where I absolutely need to know what’s going on (for instance, someone on the phone is asking a question of me specifically). Not sustainable for an entire meeting, though.

I’m mental-blocking on this – there’s got to be a solution! Ideas?

–cjb.