Using Google Speech API to transcribe interviews

What do London, Madrid, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Warsaw and São Paulo have in common?

They are the cities where Google has set up a Google Campus!

I recently checked in for a series of presentations. And the first one blew my mind.

Onome Ofoman, a “googler” from New York, demoed a couple of Machine Learning tricks, including speech to text conversion (or speech recognition, or automatic transcription) in a few terminal commands!

So when I went back home that evening, I spent a couple of hours figuring out how the Google Cloud Platform works, set up an account, and very quickly got a result with a recording I had just done!


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#museusparaque ? #museumswhatfor ?

“Museums, what for?”, the one million dollar question!

This conference took place over two days at the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio de Janeiro, in November 2016.

I’m not sure we really got an answer to this big question, but I had the honour to introduce the keynote speaker from Tate, Rob Baker.

Rob’s presentation about “The museum, brand and society” is really worth checking out. He has now moved on to MoMA in New York.

Other highlights:

Le cercle vertueux des contenus numériques au musée

Depuis 2004, je produis des contenus numériques pour des musées, sous forme d’audioguides et de guides multimédias, d’apps, de vidéos etc.

J’ai récemment fait un croquis pour expliquer pourquoi c’était important d’évaluer le contenu que nous produisions, comment cela nous aiderait à définir la stratégie numérique, et comment tout était lié.

Quelques personnes ont trouvé ce croquis utile, je le partage donc ici.

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Design Sprints at We Fab

In June 2016, a group of makers and hackers started meeting weekly at We Fab in São Paulo.

We eventually decided to gather a whole weekend for a (quick) Design Sprint, in order to work on a Minimum Viable Prototype (MVP).

The team at We Fab also wrote about this “Open Prototyping Sprint” and its Second edition (in portuguese).

Scorsese now has a Brazilian clone

or: Cloning Scorsese, the technical part

The ACMI Labs team has recently released on Github the code for the “Scorsese” audio guide web app. They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but this is important for museums all around the world.

In short: thanks to Scorsese and the ACMI team, any museum can now publish a mobile-accessible-user-friendly audio guide, using simple open source tools.

So, practically? How do you do it?

Here’s what we’ve just done for a Brazilian institution (in portuguese):
https://vilaitororo.github.io/bemvindos/

5: Vila Itororó today. 9: Francisco de Castro, who built Vila Itororó. 10: The swimming pool in 1929.
5: Vila Itororó today. 9: Francisco de Castro, who built Vila Itororó. 10: The swimming pool in 1929.

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Re: The New SFMOMA Announces Transformed Digital Strategy

SFMOMA is reopening… and with this reopening comes a whole new digital strategy!

https://www.sfmoma.org/press/release/new-sfmoma-announces-transformed-digital-strategy/

Very interesting! I can’t wait to try this IRL (or with the phone in my pocket…)

My highlights on the press release:

“the goal was to encourage visitors to look more intently at the art, and less at their screens, as they enjoyed audio while moving through the museum. The new SFMOMA app includes:

  • Immersive, head-up, phone-in-pocket audio journeys through the museum featuring perspectives from unexpected guides such as comedians Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani, high-wire walker Philippe Petit, roller-derby player Suzy Hotrod and members of the San Francisco Giants organization.
  • Creative Responses to Creativity, hundreds of 60– to 90-second audio reflections and responses to artworks in the galleries, by composers, comedians, artists and playwrights, among others.
  • A new series of audio walks through San Francisco’s urban fabric, co-produced with the museum’s Architecture and Design department. The first of these begins inside SFMOMA’s new building with the exhibition, Model Behavior: Snohetta’s First Concepts for SFMOMA, and moves out into the South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood, with stops at nearby SPUR, the California Historical Society, alleyways, public art installations and other sites of historical and design interest.”

CCTV in the Museum

Why do I need to give my CPF (my unique Brazilian Tax Payer number) or passport number to book a ticket to visit a museum? I wonder… and I wonder if my visit is going to be under scrutiny, just like this illustration…

CCTV in the Museum - illustration by Morgan Schweitzer

Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer

A few minutes later, as I was thinking about this strange experience
(15 minutes to book a ticket: registering, submiting personal data, not being able to buy ticket until email is confirmed, being told off for not filling my tax number, trying to remember my tax payer number, re-submiting, trying to remember my paypal password, reseting paypal password, eventually buying ticket, and thinking all the way through damn I should do my ICOM card but at least it’s interesting to see what visitors have to go through…), this other picture appeared on my twitter feed…
Remember when, on the Internet, nobody knew who you were?

If there are any coincidences, of course.

Good times are over.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog

Preparing an audio guide for kids, with kids

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Thursday was my first visit with a group of school pupils who will participate in the audio guide for the Histories of Childhood (Histórias da Infância) exhibition.

Some of the questions that came up spontaneously:

Is it all true genuine works here?

How do you choose the works you’re showing?

Is it a thematic exhibition about Jesus?

The day before, another kid asked:

Why is Jesus always represented as a blue-eyed blond man if he wasn’t even born in Europe and lived in the Middle East?

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SESI Cultura Digital Hackathon at MAR

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In October 2015 I was invited to take part in the jury of a hackathon at Rio’s Museum of Art (MAR).

[note: translate the post I have written in French and Portuguese]

Hackathon ideashackathon - ideias

The new Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) seen from the rooftop of MAR.IMG_1184_1280

MuseumNext, Geneva

@Musée Olympique in Lausanne - best museum driveway!
Musée Olympique in Lausanne – best museum driveway!

In April 2015 I traveled to Switzerland for MuseumNext in Geneva.

It was a great opportunity to catch up on new products, new experiences, new museums etc.
It was also very good to see many familiar faces, to catch up with old friends and former colleagues, and to put a face on some people I only knew via their publications or twitter handles.

MuseumHacks made a strong impression with the funniest presentation of the conference. It was actually more like stand-up comedy than anything and made other museum professionals look like dusty academics…

It’s quite interesting that what they’re selling doesn’t involve any technology: real flesh and blood museum guides!

Storytelling, as in: a good story, of course, but a good story well told.

Another good reminder from Nick Gray’s talk:

“Museums are competing with movie theatres, netflix, people have to be entertained before they can be educated.”

 

[look up other notes and pictures]

Musée d’Art et d’Histoire
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Google class! Hum… Here am I, skeptical about Google Glass audio guides.
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And on this one I’m just jumping out of a trench during WWI! Indeed.
Impressive POV video, yet not very interactive.
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MoNA & The O

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In 2011 I traveled to Hobart, Tasmania, to visit MoNA, the Museum of Old and New Art.

I had read something about Christian Boltanski selling his soul to the Tasmanian Devil, David Walsh, MoNA’s founder… The story I remember:

Boltanski and Walsh are having lunch.
Walsh is trying to buy a work from Boltanski. It’s too expensive. Boltanski says he could pay in several times. They joke about a life annuity. Walsh – a math genius – calculates that given Boltanski’s age, he could be getting the piece below market price if Boltanksi dies in less than eigth or nine years…
They make a deal.
Now Walsh calls Boltanksi every so often to check on his health.

 

The O

It was also a good opportunity to test The O, the ipod touch based guide that is handed over to all visitors. There are no labels on the walls in this museum.

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[look up notes and pictures]

 

getting there on MoNA ferry

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MoNA entrance

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Naoshima

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Yayoi Kusama

[look up notes and pictures]

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Chichu Art Museum by Tadao Ando

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Lee Ufan museum

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A mindblowing installation by James Turrell in a house project by Tadao Ando