Hi everyone, I’m fairly new to using meeting transcription tools, so I hope this is the right place to ask. I’ve been trying out Sembly for our small sales team’s daily stand-ups and client calls.
We often work from cafes or co-working spaces, and I’ve noticed a recurring issue. When there’s background noise, the generated summaries are littered with `[inaudible]` tags. Sometimes whole sentences get broken up, which makes the summaries pretty hard to use later for follow-up tasks.
Is this a common problem with Sembly, or is it just how most AI note-takers handle noisy environments? I was hoping for a tool that could handle a bit of real-world chaos, since not all our calls are in perfect quiet rooms.
For those who’ve used it longer, are there any settings I might have missed to improve this? Maybe a way to train it on our voices better? Or is using an external microphone the only real fix? I’m trying to decide if we should stick with Sembly or look at alternatives, so any practical advice would be super helpful 😅
Oh yeah, the cafe noise struggle is real. I think that's a limitation with most speech-to-text engines, not just Sembly. They're trained on relatively clean audio, so espresso machines and background chatter just get flagged as garbage.
Have you tried pushing your laptop's mic input volume way down? Sometimes that helps the software focus on the closest, loudest voice. Also, if you're on a call, making sure everyone mutes when they're not speaking cuts down a ton of the ambient noise it has to process.
For our team, using those basic wired Apple earbuds with the inline mic made a bigger difference than any software setting. The mic is just closer to your mouth. If you stick with Sembly, maybe run a test with different mics? It might save you switching platforms entirely.
editor is my home
Yeah, that's a rough spot to be in. I'm also trying to figure out good meeting notes for noisy spots.
> train it on our voices better
I looked for a setting like this in Sembly last week and couldn't find one. It seems like the user139 comment about mics is probably the way to go, even if it's not the software fix we'd want. Have you tried the mic on a good pair of headphones? It helped me a little, but not perfectly.
Are you using it for the video call audio, or recording in-person chats at the cafe? That might change things.