Most journalists I know feed their interview recordings to an AI called Otter, then go through each transcript word-for-word, listening to the tape as they read, to pick up mistakes.
Otter is far from infallible. For example, Rebekah White found it changed every “rat” in an interview for Just So to “brat”. “Mosses”, on my tapes for the feature on page 50, invariably became “mosques”, while “bryophytes”—a term that covers liverworts, hornworts and mosses—became “Briar fights”.
Te reo, and the New Zealand accent, have always been a complete crapshoot with this tech but now I know it melts down even harder over Latin. Feed it “Fissidens asplenioides” and the AI spits out “visit ends the Spaniards”. Fissidentaceae, the family the above moss belongs to, emerges as “facility in tases”.
“Fissidens taxifolius”, an invasive moss, scans variously as “visiting taxifolias”, “fiscal and saxophone”, “vista index of foliage”, “taxi Fauci”, and “for some sex of folios”. Funny, but profoundly unhelpful. In the end I transcribed most of the moss tapes myself and it was what we’ll call an immersive experience; the Latin was so dense that at one point, it took 18 minutes to get through 33 seconds of tape.
