Ocean Giants – Interview Workflow

Hopefully, you’ve all seen MMF’s wonderful Ocean Giants magazine by now. I’ve been happy with our first two issues, but I’m planning to change it up a bit for #3 by making the articles more interview-based, as opposed to the modified press releases I’ve often been working with so far.

I’ve had three Zoom chats so far, starting with MMF Senior Scientist Dr. Elitza Germanov and Project Leader Janis Argeswara to learn about their Microplastics & Megafauna project in Indonesia (below).

Talking to Ellie (left) and Janis via Zoom

I’ve been really enjoying it. I learnt plenty, and I think it’ll make for a great article.

Zoom dealt with the weak connection by reducing video quality to 640x360, as it turned out, but it still looks okay on playback.

Transcribing a detailed discussion would be a nightmare for a slow typist like me, so I was keen to see whether I could automate the process.

The ‘tech stack’ I’ve come up with so far is to record the video interview over Zoom (saving a separate audio file for each participant), and then I used Otter AI to generate an automated transcript from the video audio. Otter offers free machine learning-based transcription for up to 40 mins. We ended up at about 43 mins of chat time, so I clipped the file into two, uploaded them separately, and that worked fine.

This person is clearly too keen.

A full transcript, with time stamps and punctuation, was available shortly afterwards. I copied that into a Google Doc, with my premium subscription to Grammarly running in the background, to quickly run through it for one-click corrections.

For a mostly free workflow (Zoom has a free version, as does Grammarly) it all worked impressively well – Otter certainly did a great job of recording all my random verbal tics and garbled thinking, so it was lovely to see all that laid out so clearly :P

Seriously though, while it’d take a lot of work to create a completely shareable transcript (I think the interview text extended to 13 pages and over 6,000 words), I was stoked at how ‘easy’ the process was overall.

A Nusa Penida reef manta ray

From here, my plan is to use the video interview itself as an exclusive for MMF members (full details on the new membership program soonish), and to use the transcript as the basis of a really interesting article for the magazine. The latter will be out at the end of July. You can subscribe (free) to receive that here.

We’ve got an amazing team at MMF, and fantastic collaborators, so it’s great to get this ‘science communication’ project underway!