On gamifying the transcription of digital video lectures

Games can be used to exploit the computational power of humans to perform tasks that are difficult for computers. One of these difficult tasks is the transcription of video lectures. Indeed, the characteristics of the speech that occur in video lectures are not well suited for speech recognition technologies. In this paper we propose ALGA, an ALtruistic GAme, designed to involve students in the production of transcripts. Players challenge each other by listening to short, and randomly selected, pieces of the audio stream, and by submitting the corresponding transcription. When two players (unknown to each other) submit the same version, the transcript of the audio chunk is considered correct and the players gain points. To motivate players, ALGA provides the final transcript to all the players and maintains a high-score list for every video lecture. The evaluation shows that the accuracy of the obtained transcripts is higher than the one obtained by speech recognition technologies and also shows that participants like the game approach. Hence, ALGA can be considered a reasonable, feasible and affordable solution to produce transcripts from video lectures.