Am I understanding correctly that around 1997 a single person transcribed 42 hours of recordings? Wild and impressive. I wonder how long it took them?

Modern tools would likely do it in 42 minutes?

At max, two full work weeks for a lightly trained amateur to transcribe 42 hours of decent but not great quality audio. A professional could do it in near realtime.

For me, it is notable that this is notable for you. This used to be as ubiquitous of a profession in modern organizations as typists were. Many people's entire job was going to meetings and/or listening to calls, transcribing the conversation, not just taking notes.

Professional stenographers transcribe in realtime with phonetic markers and everything. Even lightly trained transcriptionists can transcribe 1 hour of audio in 1.25-1.5 hours of wall clock time. For an amateur, you could probably get to a 1:2 ratio within a few hours. It's at max two full weeks of work.

Even if the transcription was instantaneous, you'd still need to manually vet it, i.e. listen to all of it.

While 42 minutes would be hard to beat, I think that stenography was and remains a highly mature and impressive skillset.

I'm transcribing more than 42 hours of meetings and designs into software code; work is work. It's tedious and repetitive maybe but there's always people really into that kind of thing.

That’s what foundations are for. Transcription used to be a human job just like computers.

Maybe those modern tools could be used to clean up the audio and video?