Usable speech recognition

A growing number of lecture webcasts are archived after being delivered live. In the absence of transcripts, users are faced with increased difficulty in performing tasks easily achieved with text documents (retrieval, browsing, skimming). Unfortunately, speech recognition systems do not perform satisfactorily when transcribing lectures. In this paper, we present an overview of the ePresence lecture transcription project, whose goal is to improve the usefulness and usability of automaticallygenerated transcripts of webcast lectures. We achieve this by integrating novel speech recognition techniques specifically addressed at increasing the accuracy of webcast transcriptions with the development of an interactive collaborative interface that facilitates users' contribution to the improvement of machine-generated transcripts. We conclude by discussing the challenges (and possible solutions) to successfully integrate transcripts into archives of webcast lectures.