StoryCorps uses Natural Language API to provide machine-generated transcripts. These transcripts have not been checked for accuracy so they may contain errors. We understand that for our participants, this can bring up many questions about their data and privacy.
How is StoryCorps making the Online Archive accessible and searchable?
StoryCorps participants will always have the ability to hide or limit access to their interviews and transcripts. For more information about privacy settings, please see below.
Diving into how this works: for an audio recording to be searchable, the audio file and “moments” or keywords within that file—needed to be tagged with terms for which you would search.
- First we used Speech-to-Text API to transcribe the audio file.
- Then Natural Language API identified keywords and their salience from the transcription.
- Resulting in a searchable transcript on the StoryCorps Online Archive.
What information does StoryCorps share with transcription platforms and services?
To enable the transcription of the interview, StoryCorps shares the audio file and metadata including key proper nouns from the interview with Speech-to-Text API platforms to convert the interview into a text transcript.
When the Archive launched, StoryCorps used Google Cloud to transcribe its interviews. Can Google Cloud use my transcript or data?
Google Cloud Platform uses the interview and data as needed to create the transcript and provide the transcription service. Google Cloud cannot use the data further or share the transcript without permission from StoryCorps. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud’s Enterprise Privacy Commitments.
Who owns my interview?
For Signature interviews—recorded with a StoryCorps trained facilitator or StoryKit—StoryCorps owns the copyright to your interview recording. For user-generated interviews like those recorded with the StoryCorps App or StoryCorps Connect, the copyright holder is the user who uploaded the interview. Google does not maintain ownership of your interview transcript or your data.
Will my transcript and other interview data appear in a Google search or on other search engines?
The answer to this question depends on your privacy/visibility setting. Like all the information on your interview page in our archive, if you choose to set your interview privacy setting to “Public” it can be found in a Google search, and your transcript may result in it appearing in Google searches more frequently. Interviews that are set to “Private” or “StoryCorps Community” will not appear in a Google Search. You can learn more about your privacy settings here.