Live Rewind is surprisingly accurate
I was skeptical, but Live Rewind does a surprisingly decent job of understanding and transcribing what you hear.
I started by playing YouTube videos of restaurant conversations for people learning English as a foreign language: slow, clear, and with largely simple vocabulary. I sat near the iPad playing the video. It was an easy task to begin with and Live Rewind took care of it easily. The transcriptions were virtually perfect, not to mention beautifully formatted with line breaks to indicate separate short speeches.
I increased the difficulty by searching for some menus online (I selected this fine dining restaurant) and acting as a waiter myself. I selected esoteric dishes I hadn’t heard of, spoke quickly and was careless with my enunciation, added a few ums and ers, varied the volume and occasionally mumbled a little. And the feature produced a fairly accurate transcription that would have been extremely helpful to a diner who had missed an option on the list.
This time around, the formatting was more of a challenge: Live Rewind couldn’t keep track of separate sentences, so everything got jumbled together with a sometimes misleading amount of commas, and I occasionally had to decipher a sound guess when the feature didn’t recognize a term. (“IV” instead of Ivy, “7 and Y” instead of the British rivers Severn and Wye, for example). But most of the information was there.
The most difficult task was when I used Live Rewind (after getting consent!) to remember snippets of random conversations with my family. This was more varied. Got the gist most of the time. But there was more sound guesswork than before, and some phrases were omitted entirely. I think this mainly relates to distance, and I’ll come back to that later.
So Live Recall is by no means perfect. But considering the difficulty of the task (handling variations in accent and diction, mumbling and muffled speech, irregular grammar, slang, inside jokes, proper names, brand names, technical or foreign terms), it does a very solid job. My verdict is that the accuracy is high enough to be useful as a backup if you missed something, but still not accurate enough to rely on as an alternative to paying attention.
