Hi everyone! I'm trying to set up a system to automatically transcribe our team's weekly standups. We use a conference room with a ceiling microphone (looks like a standard polycom type thing).
My question: will Otter.ai work reliably in this scenario? The room is medium-sized, and sometimes multiple people talk at once or there's slight echo.
I'm worried about:
* Background noise from the AC
* People talking over each other
* The audio quality from the room's built-in system
Do I need a special setup, or can I just play the room's audio output into Otter on my laptop? I saw something about "Otter Pilot" but not sure if that's for this.
Thanks for any tips!
Your concerns are valid. Polycom ceiling mics are typically optimized for telephony, not for far-field transcription, which presents several challenges.
You can feed the room's audio output into Otter on a laptop as a test, but be prepared for suboptimal results. The main issue will be the echo cancellation and compression algorithms built into the conference system. They're designed to send a clear voice signal over a phone line, which often means aggressively filtering non-voice frequencies and applying gain control that can clip overlapping speech. This preprocessing degrades the audio signal before it even reaches Otter's AI.
For a more reliable setup, consider bypassing the room system's processing. If the ceiling mic has a direct analog output, you could run that into a dedicated USB audio interface connected to your laptop. This provides a raw feed to Otter. The Otter Pilot device is essentially a pre-configured version of this - a hardware dongle that connects to a mic output and handles the streaming to the service.
Have you measured the ambient noise floor in that room with the AC running? That's your first quantitative benchmark. Use a simple SPL meter app; if it's consistently above 45 dBA, you'll likely see significant insertion errors for quieter speakers.