Evaluation of Speech to Text Services for Industry Specific Usecase: Distributing Outage Coding

Abstract

Utilities use outage records, including the associated outage cause code to justify reliability or resiliency investment decisions. Because of their importance, most utilities implement processes to review the initial outage recording. This audit process, or “follow up,” attempts to ensure the accuracy of the cause code and update outage records in the event of any error. In this research, EPRI uses speech to text audio transcription models to automatically train and transcribe audio data of industry related terms and phrases. This report documents the performance of Google’s, Amazon’s, and Azure’s Speech-to-Text on multiple utility audio files. While results vary, the research showed that utilities can leverage transcription models to support outage collection techniques.