It's probably illegal but watch the film Crypto on YouTube. It's fussy about where it will let you watch (e.g. it's fine on my TV but for my desktop YouTube says it's not available in my country) but I want to use it to illustrate two things.
First, imagine if you work in financial services or financial crime risk and compliance, pretend you don't. Then see how much of the important detail in the film you don't understand because it's full of industry acronyms that the vast majority of people won't understand. Remember that because you are a communicator but if your audience is unable to follow your jargon, you are a failure as a communicator.
Secondly, turn on the subtitles (which Google calls captions). This is what Google says about its automatic captioning feature:
Use automatic captioning
Captions are a great way to make content accessible for viewers. YouTube can use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos.
Note: These automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the captions may vary. We encourage creators to add professional captions first. YouTube is constantly improving its speech recognition technology. However, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise. You should always review automatic captions and edit any parts that haven't been properly transcribed.
So, it's a test for "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning." In fact speech to text is one of my basic assessments for the current state of both of those things and the claims for them.
In this case, I'm not asking you to pay attention to the glaring errors that such products usually produce but instead to listen to the speech and to compare it to the subtitles. The changes in words, phrases and so on are so drastic that the entire meaning of sentences is entirely different. Literally, entirely different.
So, aside from my usual banging on about how rubbish AI and ML (to give them the acronyms that their promoters insist on using) often is, I want you to think of the risks that this presents.
Speech to text is used in many organisations for transcriptions of, for example, streamed training or other information. That includes "investor briefings" and the like. Broadcast PR is another example.
Investigative interviews are recorded and run through speech-to-text which can be viewed on screen or on paper.
The obvious conclusion is, as I so often say, that you should not rely on the output of the machines, a view that, as you can see from the above, even Google - with all its resources and trumpeted technology - supports.
Education is perhaps the most important thing about financial crime risk and compliance. It's a field that is laden with misleading buzzwords and acronyms, with fluid terminology and, sadly, with much information that is at least inaccurate and often fundamentally wrong. Content in this section is carefully moderated to avoid these pitfalls with a view to creating a vital resource for everyone with an interest in this area of endeavour.
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