E: more .
E: Yeah .
E: Uh - huh .
E: Yeah .
A: Um , any more on transcript we wanna talk about ?
B: What s so what are you so you 've done some portion of the first meeting .
E: Yes .
B: And what 's your plan ?
E: Mm - hmm .
B: To carry on doing it ?
E: What Well , you know what I thought was right now we have p
E: So I gave him the proposal for the transcription conventions .
E: He made his , uh , suggestion of improvement .
B: OK .
E: The the It 's a good suggestion .
E: So as far as I 'm concerned those transcription conventions are fixed right now .
E: And so my next plan would be B: What what do they what do they cover ?
E: They 're very minimal .
E: So , it would be good to just to summarize that .
E: So , um , one of them is the idea of how to indicate speaker change ,
B: Yeah .
E: and this is a way which meshes well with with , uh , making it so that , uh , you know , on the At the B: Yeah .
E: Boy , it 's such a nice interface .
E: When you when you get the , um you you get the speech signal you also get down beneath it , an indication of , uh ,
E: if you have two speakers overlapping in a s in a single segment , you see them one displayed one above each other .
E: And then at the same time the top s part of the screen is the actual verbatim thing .
E: You can clip click on individual utterances and it 'll take you immediately to that part of the speech signal , and play it for you .
E: And you can , eh you can work pretty well between those two these two things .
D: Is there a limit to the number of speakers ?
A: Um , the user interface only allows two .
B: Hmm .
A: And so if if you 're using their interface to specify overlapping speakers you can only do two .
A: But my script can handle any .
A: And their save format can handle any .
A: And so , um , using this the convention that Jane and I have discussed , you can have as many overlapping speakers as you want .
D: Do y is this a , uh , university project ?
D: Th - this is the French software , right ?
B: Yeah .
A: Yeah ,
B: Yeah , yeah ,
A: French .
A: Yeah .
B: their academic .
A: And they 're they 've been quite responsive .
D: eh
A: I 've been exchanging emails on various issues .
B: Oh , really ?
E: Oh .
D: Uh , did you ask them to change the interface for more speakers ?
A: Yes ,
A: and they said that 's on in in the works for the next version .
D: Good .
D: Good .
C: Oh , so multi multichannels .
A: Multichannels was also A: Well , they said they wanted to do it but that the code is really very organized around single channels .
C: I see .
A: So I think that 's n unlikely to ha happen .
C: OK .
D: Do - do you know what they 're using it for ?
D: Why 'd they develop it ?
A: For this exact task ?
D: Are they linguists ?
C: For transcription .
C: It 's D: But I mean , are they are they linguists or are they speech recognition people ?
A: I think they 're linguists .
E: Ho
E: Hmm .
B: Linguists .
C: They 're they have some connection to the LDC
B: Yeah .
C: cuz the LDC has been advising them on this process ,
C: the Linguistic Data Consortium .
D: Mm - hmm .
C: Um ,
C: so C: but a apart from that .
C: Yeah .
A: It 's also All the source is available .
A: So .
C: Right .
D: Great .
A: If you if you speak TCLTK .
D: Mm - hmm .
A: And they have they 've actually asked if we are willing to do any development
A: and I said , well , maybe .
D: Good .
C: Right .
E: Mm - hmm .
A: So if we want if we did if we did something like programmed in a delay , which actually I think is a great idea , um , I 'm sure they would want that incorporated back in .
E: Yeah , I do too .
B: Mm - hmm .
D: Their pre pre - lay .
B: Pre - lay .
E: Pre - lay .
A: Way .
E: Well , and they 've thought about things .
E: You know , I mean , they they do have E: So you have when you when you play it back , um , it 's it is useful to have , uh , a a break mark to se segment it .
E: But it wouldn't be strictly necessary
E: cuz you can use the uh , the tabbed key to toggle the sound on and off .
E: I mean , it 'll stop the s speech you know if you if you press a tab .
E: And , um .
E: And so ,
E: uh , that 's a nice feature .
E: And then also once you 've put a break in then you have the option of cycling through the unit .
E: You could do it like multiply
E: until you get <comment> crazy and decide to stop cycling through that unit .
D: Loop it ?
E: Or or D: Yo - you n you know , there 's al also the the user interface that 's missing .
E: or D: It 's missing from all of our offices ,
D: and that is some sort of analog input for something like this .
D: It 's what audio people actually use of course .
D: It 's something that wh when you move your hand further , the sound goes faster past it ,
D: like fast forward .
D: You know , like a joy stick
D: or a uh , you could wire a mouse or trackball to do something like that .
E: Why , that 's E: That 's not something I wanted to have happen .
D: No , but I 'm saying if this is what professionals who actually do this kind of thing for for for m for video or for audio  where you you need to do this ,
E: I see .
E: Uh - huh .
D: and so you get very good at sort of jostling back and forth , rather than hitting tab , and backspace , and carriage return , and enter , and things like that .
B: Mmm .
B: Mmm .
E: Uh - huh .
C: Yeah .
A: Yeah , we talked about things like foot pedals and other analog D: Mm - hmm .
A: So I mean , tho those are things we could do
A: but
A: I I just don't know how much it 's worth doing .
D: Ye - Yeah .
A: I mean we 're just gonna have E: Yeah ,
D: Right .
E: I I agree .
C: Yeah .
E: They they have several options .
E: So , uh , you know , I mentioned the looping option .
E: Another option is it 'll pause when it reaches the end of the boundary .
E: And then to get to the next boundary you just press tab
E: and it goes on to the next unit .
A: Hmm .
E: I mean , it 's very nicely thought out .
D: Cool .
E: They thought about C: Hmm .
E: and also it 'll go around the c the , uh ,
E: I wanna say cursor
E: but I 'm not sure if that 's the right thing .
A: Point ,
A: whatever .
E: Anyway , you can so they thought about different ways of having windows that you c uh work within ,
B: Mm - hmm .
E: and But so in terms of the con the conventions , then , uh , basically , uh , it 's strictly orthographic
E: which means with some w provisions for , uh , w uh , colloquial forms .
E: So if a person said , " cuz " instead of " because " then I put a  an apostrophe at the beginning of the word and then in in double ang angle brackets what the full lexical item would be .
B: Mm - hmm .
E: And this could be something that was handled by a table or something
E: but I think to have a convention marking it as a non - standard or wha I don't mean standard but a a a non uh , ortho orthographic , uh , whatever .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: Mm - hmm .
A: Non - canonical .
E: " Gonna " or " wanna " ,
E: you know , the same thing .
E: And and there would be limits to how much refinement you want in indicating something as non - standard pres pronunciation .
C: How are you handling backchannels ?
E: Backchannels ?
E: Um ,
A: Comments .
E: you know E: oh , yes ,
E: there was some E: in my view , when i when you 've got it densely overlapping , um , I didn't worry about I didn't worry about s specific start times .
C: What do you mean by du
E: I sort of thought that this is not gonna be <comment> easily processed anyway
E: and maybe I shouldn't spend too much time getting exactly when the person said " no " , or , you know , uh , i " immediate " .
B: Yeah .
E: And instead just sort of rendered " within this time slot , there were two people speaking during part of it
B: Yeah .
E: and if you want more detail , figure it out for yourself " ,
B: Mm - hmm .
C: I see .
A: Well , I think what w what Eric was talking about was channels other than the direct speech ,
E: was sort of the way I felt @ @ A: right ?
C: Well , yeah ,
C: what I mean is wh I mean , when somebody says " uh - huh " in the middle of , uh , a @ @ A: Yep .
E: Uh - huh .
E: That happened very seldom .
C: Oh , cuz I was I was listening to Dan was agreeing a lot to things that you were saying as you were talking .
D: Uh - huh .
D: Uh - huh .
E: Oh , well , thank you Dan .
C: So .
E: Appreciate it .
E: Well , if it if there was a word like " right " , you know , then I wou I would indicate that it happened within the same tem time frame
A: Yeah , there 's an overlapping mark .
C: And B: Yeah .
E: but wouldn't say exactly when it happened .
D: I 'll be right back .
B: I transcribed a minute of this stuff
C: I see .
B: and there was a lot of overlapping .
B: It was E: A lot of overlapping , yeah .
A: Well there there 's a lot of overlapping at the beginning and end .
B: Yeah .
B: Yeah .
A: Huge amounts .
B: It was at the beginning .
A: Um , when when no one i when we 're not actually in the meeting , and we 're all sort of separated , and and doing things .
A: But even during the meeting there 's a lot of overlap