Transcribing conversations

Karen asked me:

Hi Richard. I am fairly new to blogging but enjoyed yours on FaceTalk.

Question for you: I am organizing a customer advisory council with about 10 customers in the same room and want to be able to record the conversation; and have it transcribed.

Does the new technology described on [this link] do this? Or is it more tailored for individuals?

Judy asked me the same thing the other day, and the answer unfortunately is no.  Automatic transcription of conversations is a hard problem, and we don't support it in Vista, nor have I seen a good third party application that does a reasonable job. 

A long time ago, Chris Pratley and I wrote about how to do transcriptions in OneNote on Windows XP.  But as I pointed out there, you'll need an exceptionally high-quality recording and even then, you may not want to get your hopes up.