The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy: Otter.ai, Low-Resource Languages, and the Politics of Machine Listening
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What happens when Nina Eidsheim’s acousmatic question—“Who is this?”—is delegated to machines? Machine listening processes turn sound and voices into data. This article explores the political stakes that accompany the automated extraction, processing, and analysis of human voices in machine listening, specifically speech recognition. While machine listening is promoted to users in the name of utility, inclusiveness, and access, it also serves corporate purposes: the expropriation and ownership of massive collections of data. This extractive will to datafy subtends commercial and state-based machine listening operations. We outline this problematic process though two case studies: the datafication of “low-resource” languages for speech recognition in India and the widespread adoption of Otter.ai transcription services in Canada and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, noble aims—inclusion and access—are simultaneously coopted to serve corporations’ extractive projects, which are built on denying speakers the right to their own voices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".