Way back in 1952, it was the first computer speech recognition tool. Even though the technology was groundbreaking, the software could understand only digits. Since then, transcription software has come a long way. Today, transcription tools use immersive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to convert speech to text. Transcription tools can automatically record a conversation and convert that into text within a few minutes.

Does the name Audrey Hepburn ring a bell? Way back in 1952, it was the first computer speech recognition tool. Even though the technology was groundbreaking, the software could understand only digits. Since then, transcription software has come a long way. Today, transcription tools use immersive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to convert speech to text.

It happens when Google Speech-To-Text and Amazon Transcribe, both popular automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, erroneously give such age-inappropriate subtitles on YouTube videos for children. This is the key finding of a study titled'Beach to bitch: Inadvertent Unsafe Transcription of Kids Content on YouTube' which covered 7,013 videos from 24 YouTube channels. Ten per cent of these videos contained at least one "highly inappropriate taboo word" for children, says US-based Ashique KhudaBukhsh, an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology's software engineering department. KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor Sumeet Kumar of Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and Krithika Ramesh of Manipal University, who conducted the study, have termed the phenomenon "inappropriate content hallucination". "We were mind-boggled because we knew that these channels were watched by millions of children. We understand this is an important problem because it is telling us that the inappropriate content may not be present in the source but it can be introduced by a downstream AI (Artificial Intelligence) application. So on the broader philosophical level, people generally have checks and balances for the source, but now we have to be more vigilant about having checks and balances if an AI application modifies the source. It can inadvertently introduce inappropriate content," KhudaBukhsh, who has a PhD in machine learning and is from Kalyani in West Bengal, told The Sunday Express.

AI is one of the driving forces behind what The World Economic Forum called "The Fourth Industrial Revolution". Developments in this area are expected to help us further automate our workflows and simplify our daily tasks, making everything from our food production chains to management and even medical procedures, far more effective and agile. And, according to PwC, AI is expected to add up to 15.6 trillion dollars to the world economy by 2030. AI is getting smarter faster than ever, with established players, such as Google or Amazon developing and integrating AI into their products and operations, and a generation of startups from all around the globe, developing and offering AI-based tools. One of the main areas that AI is starting to be used in, is transcription services.