Alt-RD uses Sonix

“We are a young team of researchers founded in 2021, Alt-RD, hosted by CoActions a worker cooperative under self-management and working for SSE activities (social and solidarity economy ). As such, we are a non-profit organization recently approved by the French Ministry as a structure in charge of Research and Innovation. Alt-RD is working for a non-profit European research project called Better-B, which aims to harness the power of nature to restore harmony and balance within the honeybee colony and between the colony and the environment: this is resilient beekeeping! For this project, I’m interviewing beekeepers who are modifying their hives to mitigate the effects of climate change and high summer temperatures on their hives, in order to save energy for their bees.

« The most reliable AI translation/transcription service we’ve used is Sonix. However, although its service is free, it is limited (for example, only 30 minutes, which is acceptable for a test). The same goes for most transcription services that claim to be free, where there are often limitations, such as the number of free transcriptions or the number of minutes, etc. It’s worth paying for a service like Sonix, and it’s not that expensive at USD 10 per hour. https://sonix.ai/

An alternative is DeepL, but the last time we tested it against Sonix, it didn’t perform as well as the latter. Another free alternative that I also tested is to use google’s subtitling service: same results and then, you need a python script to then format the subtitles in an interview.

However, as a scientist, I have to admit that this is a rapidly evolving field with the arrival on the market of various artificial intelligence tools! So we can’t prejudge anything, but for the moment, Sonix works best.

I hope this helps you in your choice. »

HABeeTAT project has just started!

The HABeeTAT (How to Adapt Beehive To climATe Change) project, financed by Agropolis Fondation, aims to contribute to the maintenance of beekeeping activity in the face of major threats posed by climate change. It will test the possibilities of protecting bee colonies against specific local climatic changes by searching for strategies of adaptation of beehive and apiary characteristics. This project will build scientific knowledge on the beehive by combining two different methodologies: empirical surveys from beekeepers, and experimental/numerical analysis of the thermal behavior of hives on-site, using data on wood, hive construction materials, thermal sciences and climate change scenarios.

The innovation of our working method consists in combining field investigation in anthropology and numerical modeling in mechanics of the wood material (thermal sciences). This perspective of co-constructed knowledge for adaptation of the hive to climate change relies on the confrontation of empirical human knowledge and quantitative data from measurement or evaluation tools.

Start/end date: 01/09/2022 – 31/10/2023

Project Number : 2101-022

Links: https://www.agropolis-fondation.fr/How-to-Adapt-Beehive-To-climATe-Change