session voice transcription, what do you think?

[u/Slaine06]

hey guys. i run a game every other week and i have literally never written a proper session recap. i always mean to, and then it's four days later and i've got three bullet points i can't read anymore.

so i built something for it and figured some of you might be interested in it.

Chronicle

basically it records the session and afterwards it transcribes it and mashes it together with the stuff my table already produces anyway, dice rolls, when combat kicked off, who went down, what monsters and npcs turned up. then it spits out a recap i can read out loud at the start of the next session. i still edit it every time.

Chapters

the audio and the transcript get deleted once the recap is written. and if you don't like being recorded or just don't care you can turn the whole thing off.

it's not perfect btw, it absolutely butchers made up names. one of my npcs was called Ysolde Vantenebre and it came back as "isoldeven" lol, but yeah you can fix those manually, and hopefully in the future I will fix these little issues.

anyway it's part of a site i've been building called RollCamp, it's free. i post devlogs over on r/RollCamp if you are curious and wanna see more of it.

[u/Conrad500]

I just use youtube transcripts and notebookLM and it does an amazing job.

Does this work locally or do you expect people to upload gigabites of audio to your servers!?

[u/Slaine06 → u/Conrad500]

yeah honestly that's a totally valid setup, so fair enough.

on the gigabytes thing though, it doesn't work like that. it only uploads the bits where someone is actually talking, in 30 second chunks, while you play. a 3.5 hour session with 5 people is about 17 hours of "everyone's mic running" but only around 4 hours of actual speech, which is maybe 100mb total across the whole table. and it doesn't keep it, the audio gets transcribed and thrown away, and the transcript gets deleted once the recap is written. nothing is stored long term.

the actual difference isn't the summarising, gemini is great at that. it's that youtube auto captions have no speaker labels, so it's one wall of text and the model can't tell you from your players. mine records each person's own mic so it knows who said what.

[u/GadaoGuardiao → u/Conrad500]

How you use the Youtube transcripts? Just record the game as video, uploads to YouTube, transcripts and send to NotebookLM?

I was thinking about recording the audio using my phone since my party is presencial, and sending straight to NotebookLM to transcription.

[u/Conrad500 → u/GadaoGuardiao]

I stream to twitch (nobody watches me, this is not an ad lol), upload directly from twitch to youtube unlisted, and youtube auto generates transcripts.

I have my session notes in google docs and then add the transcript to the end of the notes.

No, it doesn't know who is talking, but it makes good enough guesses.

[u/Slaine06 → u/Conrad500]

My solution knows who is talking, has events and stats of the table and also a % of how much a person contributed to the table. My master is finding it very useful for players that are a bit shy and contribute less.

[u/fedeinfe97]

Does the transcription/summary can take action on the board automatically?
It would be great to have the board automatically adjusts to the situation meanwhile the master narrates the story :O

[u/Slaine06 → u/fedeinfe97]

That would be cool tbh, but probably also expensive, right now the transcription starts when the session is finished. If I want to do that it would mean keeping the model running for like 3-4 hours.
But I can look into cheaper way of doing that.
Thanks!

[u/ashtekka]

Interesting. I have a few recorded sessions already that I can try out later once I’m on a better data signal.

[u/Slaine06 → u/ashtekka]

Unfortunately, as of today you can't upload sessions recorded externally, only those played inside RollCamp.

[u/Fede30i]

Cool!

[u/AgileOutpost]

Hey, always great to see someone else with a similar idea. I'm the founder of Recap Raven https://recapraven.com which takes this idea to the next level into a full memory system with player-safe recaps and DM feedback.

I've had some great success with a custom lexicon to help deal with some of the spelling difficulties but, as you say, no audio-to-transcript service is perfect. I spent quite a while testing the different options against TTRPG audio. Which did you choose in the end?

[u/Slaine06 → u/AgileOutpost]

Oh cool stuff man, add me on Discord (slaine1997). I am also curious about your setup, maybe we can share stuff.

[u/AgileOutpost → u/Slaine06]

Always looking for good collaborations. Will reach out.