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Implement a fully redundant digital audio recording and transcription system for capturing committee meetings and Main Chamber sessions so as to facilitate the production of the Official Report of The Scottish Parliament.
The audio output of the conferencing systems of the Main Chamber and of committee rooms are continuously recorded by two redundant sets of Dalet Audio FIFO systems (1). A 24 hour loop captures each feed as an MPEG-2 Layer 1 24 KHz at 48 Kbps, mono stream. When a session or meeting starts, a recording is triggered (2). The corresponding media is directly written to the Dalet Content Catalogue (3) which runs on a cluster so as to ensure additional redundancy. As a recording is on-going it is immediately available for play-out on any of the ActiveLog workstations used by Parliament reporters (4). This facilitates the transcription process and makes the production of turns, sections and day-parts (5) all the more easier that reporters can listen from their desktops to the recording of what was said in a committee room a few seconds before. The editing of the Official Report is ensured using Microsoft Word and two versions are produced: one in English, the other in Gaelic.
In transcription environments such as the one of The Scottish Parliament, Dalet ActiveLog:
Improves productivity by eliminating tape handling and logistics;
Optimizes maintenance cost by eliminating the need for tape recorders and tape replacements;
Improves the quality of the transcript by providing reporters with improved audio quality recordings;
Accelerates the transcription turn-around by allowing transcription teams (or rotas) to dynamically change the duration of transcription turns;
Facilitates the archiving process by automating the digital storage of recorded sessions.