Computer Assisted Indexing (Live with Ty Davies and Ian James)

so this is an exciting place to be everybody um as we wait for people to join let's have you guys introduce yourselves ian will you tell us like a little bit about who you are where you are and what you do at family search sure so hi my name is ian james um i am in the lehigh utah building which is the engineering building for family search primarily and i am a technical product manager on ty's team i work with the ace team the automated content extraction team say that one more time the automated content extraction team okay for everybody in the back so they can understand what that means what does that mean um that means that we are like and and tai is going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute but um we are all about trying to find ways that we can accelerate this work basically um value for us means that that people are able to find their ancestors and connect to those ancestors and the primary means that we have to do that's through historical documents right and so we're basically exploring every avenue that we can in order to help people be able to find their ancestors in those documents as fast as soon as possible okay and we are going to dive into a lot of the work that you've been up to so and um tell us about your family and then we'll go bye um my family is awesome um met my wife swing dancing you did yep and we have three boys um and and one on the way and we don't know what it is yet are you going to find out no we're not going to find out we're going to let it be a surprise like let us know what you think the gender is and people that are joining we're thrilled to have you here and let us know where you're joining from okay ty tell us about your fam and kai you got ty is back i am back early on yeah thanks wendy for having me come back on i think if you know what i mean it's a thrill it's a thrill so so i do i am the director of product management for records which means i'm in charge of all the technology from capturing records in the field through publishing them online is what i do for family search and and i've been doing this a really long time so at least seems like forever but yeah um and i've been with family search for about 14 years so a long time so and my family i have i'm an empty nester but i have three children and uh my wife and i met in salt lake city not swing dancing but in sort of more boring ways so at a about this time of year actually we met for the first time during a halloween party in salt lake city okay this is exciting i mean a year later we were married so there you go wow this is a good time of year it is a good time of year especially to get to know people especially during 2020 right exactly right and and ian's one of the lucky people he gets to be in the office i get to be in my home which you know so now you get to see him in the background of my home i think last time you got to see the back the background of my steps which is because you were under the direction [Music] yeah we were all under construction that's what makes this work i think and people who are watching you're watching from your houses let us know you know where you are and if you're in similar situations um today is exciting though because like we kind of mentioned this is information and updates that we haven't really talked about yet so we're going to talk about some new technologies and we're going to take questions and but really let's talk a little bit about explore records before we get into computer assisted indexing so help us kind of understand what that is hi let me let me talk let me talk last time we we chatted wendy remember we talked about my my brother that had passed away and we found it in images and the importance of sort of what images are all about right because because and we sort of traced his life through the images that we had through a product called explorer images and explorer images is a fantastic product we have about 4.2 billion images on them on on on explorer images from all over the globe like from everywhere from every pretty much every country in the world and the value of those is is although they're unindexed you can still find your ancestors through sort of um navigating through those images very much like you would navigate through images on like google images or one of those other products your search engine products right um but and it's a great experience and but the problem is is that you have to search it sort of differently than you do in our historical record search right and and everybody has been participating in indexing and it's been great but let me i told you we have about 4.2 billion images on family search right now which is huge but only about half a billion of them have been indexed what what percentage is that can someone laugh it's like 500 500 million of them have been indexed okay so less than what um a fourth of them have been indexed oh my goodness so this is a lot of data that people a lot of special people just don't have and we've been indexing and and if there are any indexers out there they have been doing a great job because the lions share that 565 million images have been done by our indexers through and it has been fantastic and and what we're going to talk about today is really how we're going to evolve them in the future really and and what the future holds for indexing but we'll always need um our volunteers our indexer always need but we've been indexing for a really long time of about as long as i've been here 14 15 16 years and it's gotten us to about the 565 million images which is fantastic but let me give you another statistic that's going to sort of blow your mind okay if we stayed at that place it would take us uh about 40 years to do all the images that are available to people and we're adding years every week that's right every day we're adding more images right so every year we add to that 40 40 years we add another 10 years to the backlog so next year's it'll be 50. oh no we don't like that that's right right it's just i mean we want to make the images available to more people faster right yes and and really that's what it means and so we've been trying and and when inda and ian used that the automated computer assisted indexing and all those kind of fancy terms right what that really means is that we're exploring different ways to get more of these records out to people faster and that's going to introduce you know this artificial intelligence capability that we've been talking about we talked about at roostech for the like the last couple of years and we're starting to get to a place where we're gonna start publishing more records through that computer assisted indexing and so um i think we probably had a let's show why don't you go ahead and show them some of that stuff yeah you bet um so just to like here i'll just share my whole desktop with you it seems kind of risky but there we go um we've been here before haven't we wendy yes we have this is exciting i can't wait to see if this will work and everyone who's joining us like let's remind you um these are available when we're done and please you know add to the comments and we have moderators in there who can answer questions and we're just excited to see what ian's gonna share okay ian okay can you see that all right so this this ticker is real by the way uh tai was saying we have about 4.2 billion images and this is yeah this is more or less accurate um tai also pointed out that the the problem of kind of just like this exponentially growing backlog right that basically keeps growing until until we've captured all the images that there are left to capture like on earth and that is a finite number but we think it's still a ways out there and also kind of going going along with what ty said um like the the contributions and the value that that our volunteers have created so far is absolutely monumental and what we're interested on this team and in this effort is and as we show you some of this technology i want you to keep this in mind is not to replace that it's to make it better it's to make it so that our volunteers contributions can have greater impact um by letting the humans do things that humans are really good at and letting the machines do things that machines are really good at oh that sounds like a great plan and so we'll always need people to help absolutely absolutely as you'll find out and i think and i don't mean to steal any of thai's thunder but when it comes to artificial intelligence which time mentioned it's definitely artificial but it's not always intelligent um and we're gonna see some examples of that um and so but again like we want you know for any hour that that somebody were to come and volunteer um and help at family search we want to have to absolutely make the most out of that hour and and what we're going to look at today is kind of part number one of of that plan which is which is the computer assisted indexing stuff right the computer stuff but there's this whole second part of the plan um that has to do with volunteers that we'll talk more about in a minute so anyway here's here's explore historical images um and as you know you you guys have used this before um you can jump in you can search image groups this this uses a system of metadata to break down image groups into the smallest groups possible and we have we have plans to to make it possible to break these down even further but even then right you have an experience where primarily like you're you're digging into images something similar to this and you're looking at images one at a time and reading each image and saying you know is my person in here and and with all the amazing stuff that's going on with indexing um one of the reasons why there isn't more going on with indexing is actually not because we we have like too few volunteers it's because we have big bottlenecks and overhead and at family search to set all of the stuff up that has to support indexing and so we're looking at any way that we can to accelerate that work and so right now most of the indexing that has happened most of the index records exist in like english-speaking countries or like western european countries and and there's a lot of the world that's left kind of underserved and that's really where we're looking is to try and kind of balance the scales there and so our team is focused on on venezuela right now um and other spanish countries we're we're focused on um on building up capability there and let me just show you a little demons like here here are some records that we've recently processed so we're looking at like this is live this is on the site um and i just pulled this up so that you wouldn't have to see me go through everything but this is looking at an image like through the normal record search way if you were to go searching for records yeah why don't you show them how they can identify a computer assisted indexed record because i think everybody is sort of like wanting to know so now you've got sort of index records and you've got computer assistant index records how do you sort of tell them apart how can you once you show them yeah great call so if i so this is just a normal old you know record search results page and i'm just going to click on the first one of these whoops and i'm going to go so far as to say open in a new window and do you see this blue banner right here you guys um this is your first indicator that says then it just says right here like this record was indexed by a computer and there could be errors errors and in fact i'll pretty much guarantee you that there probably will be errors um and so and it has you know some instructions on on and more to learn and how to report errors and then it mentions it makes mentions of this little errors tab right here um and this tab is for being able to report some of those errors you know there are a couple ways to do this actually like as you can see there's a way to like edit the the record directly um that lets you edit things like names and dates and places but for some things like let's say that we missed somebody altogether or we got a relationship wrong or something like that that's what this other one over here is for is that you can basically put in any other kind of error into here and we have we have some missionaries who help basically take these changes and apply them to the records and so i have a couple of questions before you go uh too much deeper and and i think so how many different types of images have have um the blue you know pieces on them are are you involved with computer assisted indexing and how do you decide what projects and maybe maybe that's something that you can say we can't disclose that but um is this on every image this experience um right now it's only on the images that have been processed by a computer um how many toes um i don't know tai would do like it's about it's about 36 million images that met right now and you're you're slowly letting ty put his neck out there that's right this is a gradual process you know it wendy it's not going to happen you know you have to remember this is sort of a novel technology it's not it's something that we're learning to use we still very much rely on our indexing capabilities but it's still very much a new technology and so you're going to start seeing but you're going to start seeing more and more records with this kind of capabilities our goals are to get to like 10 times the number of records that we're doing today and to do that we have to use some of this computer assisted indexing to help us sort of get that over that hurdle so we can get a lot more of those 4.2 million or two 4.2 billion records out that's right but but you're going to start seeing it slowly over time right and you're going to start seeing more and more and the first place you're going to start seeing it really is like in the spanish collections in our latin american collections so if you have a latin american heritage that's the place you're going to start seeing it first right um we do have some like in in newspapers and things like that but what you're first going to start seeing is and ian's showing a latin american collection here i actually found some of my own ancestors [Music] death certificates for example and they were all done in in um through computer assisted indexing as well right and they have some of these same capabilities in here they have a little blue banner they have the little blue boxes on them so like in order to click on the image you can see the little blue boxes around them all those are indicators that that is a computer assisted index and what's so cool about the blue box is is you can take a look at it and you can see hey i can see where my ancestors highlighted right and where they actually exist on that record and that all comes through the computer so the computer adds a lot of different features and value that we wouldn't get really any other way it's just a real it's really a great blessing not only in terms of the number of records we can get out but also in terms of what you get when you do do the indexing right because you get labels and you get more people indexed and you get more stuff but but um like ian said sometimes it's not so the computer is not so intelligent right right that becomes a real problem for us um and i think it's really interesting to think and you guys you've shared this before that this everything that you're working on it's building on the previous um so we wouldn't be able to do this if you hadn't made it possible for people to edit the um indexes right right which is it's just it's so exciting and we're seeing a piece but it's part of a very long overarching plan to do what ty said and and ian you've talked about which is increase the ability for people to connect to their ancestors on these records by making them searchable that's right and knowing that but um sometimes people think oh you're going to get away get rid of our indexes and that we built for and the answer is no we're not going to do anything like that this is intended to be improved and improve the experience and improve on the work that other people have already done it's not intended to sort of wipe out the past that's not what we're trying not at all it's way too much future to worry about that's right there's way too much future and what we're really trying to do is trying to improve not only are our people that search our records every day but also are those people that index our records every day in trying to improve their experience and so that they can go faster and they can help and do where the computers it's interesting because where the computer is not so smart and where it's not very intelligent and it acts pretty artificial humans can do it really really quickly and where humans have troubles the computer does really really quickly and so there's this great synergy that can happen between technology and and volunteers and people that are using their records and improving and making a better and that better experience for everybody wow that's exciting okay and you you can take it back away and keep talking through that this is good yeah so i actually picked this record um intentionally and there are a couple others that'll demonstrate you know some other kind of pros and cons of this approach um as we go forward but as you can see i mean one it kind of helps like you you show up on this page and something that we typically haven't been able to do like imagine imagine like a big census page or some large records page right we haven't been able to say oh and right over here on the image that's where your guy is and one of the benefits of like the computer assisted indexing is we can do that you can say like yep this is the this right here is the record that's talking about your ancestor or your person of interest and when we zoom in on it it says oh yeah and we can actually like call out the key pieces of information that we're using to build out that record so like here's the date and here's another date or an age yeah born on this date here's the name and so forth and so on for the other people in this record and one of the things that makes this one interesting is that there is the mom in this record her name right here gets chopped and so you can see that her name the priest wrote it so that her name continues like breaks across this line and this is an example where the computer has a mistake it has like the priest wrote this like little equal sign which probably means like continued on next line right but it picked it up and said oh there's actually like an equals sign in there and so the question is is do you think that this is a name that you could find right if you were searching for this person on this record and the answer is probably in the majority of cases yes but let's say that you landed here and you saw this well the next step naturally is well i want to fix that and so part of what we're doing that's the that's the other half that i mentioned earlier that complements all this computer stuff is is much more robust tools that let our patrons um get involved in improving the records that they care about and we want all that side of the equation we refer to that affectionately as the curation model model yeah and and a key a key element of that kind of a tenet of the whole idea is that it's affinity driven meaning that like basically you go after things that you're interested in and you work on them and you've got free reign to take it as far as you want to take it and make it as perfect as you want to make it and so we know that that our patrons are much much better at caring for and policing the quality of their records than we are and that they have many many more eyes than we do and so we by all means want to empower them in that regard to do that and so that's that's part of that other half um this is coming first because we need the data first we need the data first in order to inform like how those how those fix-it tools need to work um and so the data is coming out first but right on its heels are the tools to fix everything and so and when should where did you go fix the name so that yeah show us what that sure yeah should we just go fix this one let's just go fix this one because i think everybody would love to see how we actually fix if they haven't like fixed a record yet i think this would be a good time for them to see how that works yeah while you're doing that details um erin is saying that i'm on an obituary in in her family crescent the crescent city theater was listed as a person but the family member actually worked there and so it's it's interesting to see and it's so important like you said computer assisted indexing can speed things up but we still need our human um volunteers indexers to to make sure it's accurate and there are errors that other people are commenting that there's they found errors there are and one of the best parts about computers is the indexing that ian sort of highlighted was that you'll be able to work on records that are meaningful to you right so you you know we talked about this last time one day i was on but that sometimes when you find your ancestor that's your record that's your family record and this gives you the ability to to make sure that you have that you can work on your family records and your family and from your homeland so that as you go find those little villages you can go make sure that they're all perfect and and they're for your own family which is in my opinion one of the great things that computer assisted indexing gives gives us is that ability so go ahead and once you hit edit sure so i'll go in here and edit this um and again like if you haven't used this before this is like one of the the abilities that we have right now that's live on the site to come in and edit um names so we'll fix this oops did it move my cursor for me i'll make sure that's right so from cisco francisca yep okay reason we made this edit say it was indexed in correctly save cool see now it's already saved and it's searchable and everything else rather than family search something it's that easy and and something that a lot of people have brought up is they're like well like you know obviously this is something that needs to be fixed right but let's say that let's say that you know uh my uncle went by a gym his entire life and somebody came in and changed it to james and i was like no like it's it's you know yeah and we got into like an edit war um over what value was the right value well this this also kind of makes that moot because both of these are searchable like it doesn't replace one with the other it just adds alternative values and they'll all bring up the search so this is this is really beautiful for indexers because like we said before we're never going to replace what our indexers are done or we don't want to replace whatever industry's done and and you know but sometimes our even our indexers make mistakes not just the computer but sometimes our indexers but we always save everything that was put in so that you can find it again you can go back to it again exactly what you see the other thing wendy is is you need to remember that now this sort of changes things because as we release more of these collections they're constantly being improved so just because you couldn't find a name one day in a collection doesn't mean that they won't get improved the next day and you'll be able to find your ancestor in them so they're constantly improving all the time and that's sort of an important concept because if you thought your ancestor was supposed to be there well they may have been they just need a volunteer to go clean it up and improve them right and so that's going to count there's going to be sort of this constant improvement of records over time and getting them improved is sort of one of the things that we're going to use our volunteers and our and and our people searching to help us do all that so one of the questions we have is um you know when you're indexing you can sign out a batch and you can do things like that is this more of an and you know an experience where oh you're in a set that has something you're looking for and then you fix it or do people do this in batches as well um i i'll let ty give the full story on this one but i think that the intent is to kind of allow either like obviously like the the the example that we just gave is is kind of more along the first lines where it's like we were looking for somebody we noticed an error and we fixed it right then right um we kind of refer to that activity internally here at family searches participation like that somebody's become a participant they've actually engaged and added something like while they were in on the way to do something else on the other hand right we also have a lot of great people who come and volunteer and they're interested in doing like a lot of you know being doing more right and having just lots of things that they can go work on and and that is definitely going to be part of this as well but those parts aren't fully developed yet those parts are still coming why don't we just go ahead sorry no good i'm sorry for interrupting you go ahead uh one of the nice things about the computer assisted indexing is that the computer can also tell us how good it thinks that record was and we can basically put flags on ones that are of questionable quality and and send people send volunteers straight to those so that again back to the point of you know maximizing the impact that somebody has on the site so i'm i want to address this question about batches and that sort of thing what you should think about this and from my perspective is than wendy is is that we're going to try to be as flexible to meet the needs of the users as possible like we're not we're not going to i don't want we don't want to be able to say to somebody you have to do 10 images if you want to do one great if you want to do 100 great what is it that you want to do and a part of the computer assisted indexing really helps but the change really is is not is not you know how you want to work the changes is how quickly it gets published and how quickly it's available to the public and to people it's immediately available that's going to be the difference right instead of it being indexed and it's waiting for sometimes years for that to get that what you index to be out on the website what's different about what we're doing today is the minute you finish editing the record or finish cleaning up the record from indexing it'll be available immediately immediately immediately right this changes live right now and and so that immediacy is what's so exciting that the automation provides to us the the computer side the computer side indexing is that immediacy that we've just never had before both in terms of improving records and then also in indexing records wow okay and this is just barely available this piece here which is just really exciting again you're so we're sort of letting you peek behind the curtain here as we're sort of learning how to do this right we're not we're not um we're we're not perfect at it we're still sort of learning about how to go about doing it you know we talked about sort of this novel technology called computer assisted indexing or automation or or artificial intelligence it's novel for us it's new and so we're letting you peek because you're going to start experiencing it on family search and so we don't want you to be surprised we don't want you to be hey what is this edit button and what is this blue banner and why am i seeing it more right and and and what is computer assistant indexing and all those kinds of questions we sort of want to answer right and and and and help you understand how you can get engaged and how you can improve and that it's not going to be perfect because it's artificial it's not it's not human and we want the human to play but because it is artificial so and i think i think it's so interesting to have you both explaining the intent and the technology behind because i think sometimes people see changes and and it's like this is so helpful to understand the process and how much effort goes into it right right and the fact that this allows the change to be instantaneous is a big deal that's right exactly right and and it's really the only way wendy that we're going to be able to get to the 4.2 billion records right it's the only you know our goal like i said before is to do 10x which means that we'll be able to provide you know in the next hopefully in the next 10 years all the high value records that we want to provide throughout all the world right that's the goal is to get us to a point where you're not that that you can find your ancestors within the records of family search and they're there they're searchable they're findable and they're high quality so you can go and build your tree and you can find your ancestors like you've never found them before quickly and fast and the only way we're going to be able to do that is if we bring the computer in because we're constantly getting further and further behind but what what people often think is the computer is going to replace me and what we're saying over and over again is no what you're going to be able to do is actually contribute faster the way you want to and probably a lot more than you've ever been able to before and and that's if you're if you've been an indexer if you've been uh you know searching our set what that should tell you i'm hoping that tells you is is that hey um the way i contribute is going to be more meaningful in the future okay ian show us what else you've got up here all right i pulled a couple of other ones um here hang on here we go i wanted to give a little bit of a demonstration like on this one you can see that there's a lot of bleed through from the text behind and this is actually kind of a light case there are cases of this that are a lot more severe but one of the things that this can do is it can decipher that there are also some pretty high variance in handwriting that it can also decipher really well like surprisingly well and so it's it's really good at things like that um surprisingly and so i had one that had like a big hole in the page with a bunch of tape on it um and i can't i can't find it i might have closed it accidentally but um it does a pretty good job with a surprising range of content um and the hope is is that things that were only accessible through somebody like thumbing through the images to try and find them right we we hope to be able to make those findable a lot faster and to ty's point they might not be perfect but they'll be findable and the tools will be there to make them perfect um and so we're we're excited about that um i guess that if i if i could like put in one message to to everybody it would be and this goes along with what ty said you know this is really novel we're just learning we're just learning how to do this and it's requiring a ton of change inside a family search to kind of get acclimatized and used to the kind of data that this generates and the kind of ecosystem that has to exist for our patrons to be able to use and leverage this data and so we're learning this and my message to all of our volunteers would be stick with us come with us on the journey um we want to make our volunteer experience just just richer just better just bigger um and of greater value to you um and to all of the people whose records you touch and so um that's that's the trajectory and so even though like like i could understand and i've i've talked to people who've been like oh well you're replacing indexing and the the resolute answer to that is no we're not changing we're we're changing it like we're changing it but we're definitely yeah we want to make it we want to make it bigger and better and so there you go the other thing the other thing is is wendy uses and it sort of goes without saying i think but um we'll be doing [Music] i think you're going to have us back on more this in 2021 and we're excited because there's going to be more that we're going to be introducing i talked about us learning right right now but we're learning uh on two sides one's on the computer side but on the other side we're learning about how to keep have volunteers and and people um interacting with records in new ways editing correcting and that sort of thing and so there's going to be more that we're going to be introducing in 2021 to help people interact more with these records in terms of improving them their accuracy and volunteering and all those kinds of things so stay tuned because i think there's a lot that 2021 is going to offer for us that's going to be exciting to our users um you know we've what what artificial intelligence and computer system endings give us is just more ways to sort of expand the use of our records and to improve the user experience and improve what we're doing and so you're going to see a lot of changes i think starting in 2021 and then in within the next year where we where we're sort of improving um how you can use records and and being more human bring more humans into her into our record equation so i think that's all good too so yes i think it's just and i'm so curious about um the motivation for people on your team tie and for you ian and as you get in this technical work and you you talk about the novel technology and all of the changes in these big numbers what does it actually mean to you to be participating in something like this that's just awesome like we just we just finished our our team iteration planning um just before hopping on the live stream um and um it's just it's just amazing like i i worked in the game industry before i came to family search um and i was really worried that the family search would be terribly boring to be completely honest um and i so was and what i found was the complete opposite i found that the meaning the meaning behind what we were doing was absolutely tremendous and that that that by itself made it just amazing to be to be engaged at all and besides that it turns out that the problems were really interesting and the people were really nice and it was a great place to work also um but it's it's just a total i mean i know it sounds kind of kind of corny but it's it is an honor um but mostly i count it as a privilege to be able to be here at this time and working with these people on these things and so wow i love that you know wendy for me what it means is it takes me back and i i always go back to the story because it helps people understand what my motivate what my what my motivation is right and it comes back to that time when i was struggling to find my ancestor right you sit there and you go i know that they're there i know that they're there i just don't have the right record i don't i can't find the right person i'm not typing this in the right way right it's so frustrating right and the motivation for me is to alleviate that frustration right to give people the capability to actually find their family right and in in my case that can be my brother right it can be um and it can be somebody that i am searching back in the 1700s right they're still my family right and the frustration always comes um you know i i just can't find a record set that i need to find on it and that's what sort of gets me up every day and that has me participating this for 14 years and all that sort of thing and what gets me so excited about the computer system indexing is because now i can find the i'll be able to find there's i have hope that those records will be available to me sometime in my lifetime right whereas before it was sort of like not in my lifetime right not going to happen right but now i'm sitting going there is hope that the records that i need will be available to me in my lifetime and that doesn't mean just for people in north america it means all around the globe yeah and that's what gets sort of gets me excited about what we're doing and is is and and you know the pressures and the difficulties and the hard parts are all making all worth it if we can make that experience good for our patrons and and we get feedback all the time wendy and it's fantastic i love the feedback just like you do we get feedback all the time about how great it is recordable that we make them free that they're available to everybody and and you know that's what's so great about working for family search and everything that we do is you know is getting that feedback that tells us yeah you're i did find that my my family i did find my ancestor and we have so many people who are commenting on how much they love indexing and nelson is saying working on family history is so much more rewarding than gaming but gaming is a lot of fun so yes yes um and then the the question we've had a couple of questions um and people are asking about roots tech and we want to remind everyone and thanks for chris for posting this rootstech2021 is virtual and free so please join and and will you be talking either of you about these changes that you know that have happened but things that are also happening can you tell us they want to know what's going to be talked about so roost tech um i'm not exactly sure what we're going to talk about roose tech tour you don't know i don't know everything area because it's got to come because because i don't know everything we're going to do next year we're just sort of trying to figure that out as we go like i said we're trying to learn as we go but we will be talking about all this stuff at roots tech we'll be talking about records just like we did last time we'll be talking it'll be ian or me or john or somebody we'll be talking i'm pretty sure about records and what's coming in the future you know we have lots of product i have lots of product managers that work for me in terms of jason pearson that you guys all know about john alexander john all those guys that that are are are really great at delivering great products for us to use i'm sure they'll all be participating at richtek family search you yeah come to roots tech because you will learn about this and all sorts of other changes and we had someone asking a question about this computer assisted indexing and they wanted to know does that work with like when it comes to memories or artifacts documents will the same technology ever be a part of being able to read digitize stories that's a really good question that's a really really good question and the answer is i don't know but i think so right okay i think i think that's just a natural extension of what we want to do um you know our biggest problem is making sure people can find the records that's our biggest problem but um so many of those documents though are also available through ocr technology already that's available to them let's say what ocr is optical character recognition that's one of those artificial intelligent words that's sort of an acronym that doesn't make any sense but it you know what's unique about what we're doing here is it's actually reading handwriting from old documents so we'll be able to read gothic german right we'll be able to read all those things and ocr doesn't do that very well um and so that's what's a little novel about this technology is um now we do have a lot of journals and things from people that are all hungry a digital library right right and all that stuff and i am i envision i imagine that over time we'll get to all those documents and we'll get we're going to provide more of those capabilities to you as indexers it's just going to take time and the priority for your team is as you call them i think you said high quality records that's right yeah delivering high quality records all over the world which is just and and guys how many languages are we in now have we released all these languages that we've been talking about this whole year are we at like 40 or 30 do you know i don't know off the top of my head and do you know off the top of your head right now how many languages were actually not right off the top of my head john alexander would be able to tell us so yeah i'm going to text him real quick probably one of our moderators will be able to tell but i just i think i think it's i think it's 22 actually i don't know i think it's 50 no i don't know oh no i i'll all i did was go out the website and count so but we're adding more languages all the time i think it's so exciting to think about the impact that the work that you do has on on people all over the world so that we have a couple more questions and i think we'll have we have time for like one or two more but one person is asking um they're asking about specific record sets so if people in the comments have questions about specific record sets and things that aren't working for them what would you recommend they do who do they reach out to what's the process for that and if they want if they're interested in records from a certain area how how do you communicate with these requests so one of the things i would i would suggest is that that we have a customer service line you know um that they can call and sort of log in they can send feedback to us through our feedback channels on our website i would suggest you do all that those that stuff is taken very seriously it may not seem that way but it really is when you get engaged in our you know contact us on the family search there's like a little email message you can send us and all that stuff is actually taken into oh you know we we weigh that in in terms of which records we're going to do and all that feedback gets put in so that's the best way to put to to sort of add that record kind of information if you want to say hey can you do more records from this particular area so okay okay that's awesome by the way i'm hoping we hopefully at rootsec we have more good information about that sort of thing so yes oh is there anything that you can i mean we got like you said you filled the curtain back for us is there anything else you want to sneak and just give us a glimpse of anything um no we've we've opened the curtain way too far right the truth of the matter is is if i opened it up anymore i would be lying so i don't want to we don't want that we don't want that um and thank you to everyone oh air aaron i have a aaron has a question that i can answer she wants to know how does she get to work for family search because you guys make it seem so amazing and awesome with the inspiring so erin we will i'll make sure one of the moderators point you in the direction of employment with family search it's a it's a it's a pleasure to be able to be involved with people like ian and ty and everyone who's been watching as we all kind of come together and realize how not only how important our family is but how we can help other people connect with their family which is why i think indexers and our volunteers are so inspiring to us because they do things you know on their own and and people have been commenting how important indexing is and we just want to say thank you to everyone and you guys you get you get the final word so what last message would you like to leave to those who are participating i'll i'll go to ian first and then and then tai um just thank you thanks for being amazing um as as was mentioned like there's there's so many messages um and and offerings in the world today right that um that i i feel like an immediate kinship to people who resonate with like all the virtues of family history and all the strength that comes to individuals when they when they connect and they get that feeling of connection to their family and that is just so absolutely a mission that i can get behind and so i am just thrilled to be engaged in it with everybody so it's awesome to get to talk to you i love how you said that you have a shared kinship with other people doing the same thing no matter where they are or um where they live or where they've grown up or what their family is like we come together in this effort we are all in this together yes we are okay ty what do you have to say as we just i'm gonna just echo what ian said which is thank you right um thank you to those people that sort of get on our website and and do what they do we hope that we're providing you the experience that you want to provide that you need um so that you can find your family but also to thank a special shout out and thanks to our indexers who means meant so much to us over the years we don't this work doesn't happen without a lot of volunteers sort of participating in this work so all those of you that have volunteered thank you very much and come help us some more because we need you yeah i didn't want to use that euphemism but yeah that's that's that's what i'm saying yeah all right but really come with us like the road ahead looks pretty awesome that's right and they've been with us for so long it's just you know just keep stay with us it's exciting and um like you said you want to ten times the effort with these um releases and i'm here for it i think you guys are awesome thank you and thank you so much to everyone who participated our moderators and those that were commenting we will be here next week and um make sure and sign up for roots tech it's free it's virtual you can hang out with people like ian and ty and learn all the things so thank you everybody

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 6,417

Rating: 4.8907104 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: EXcCp5PgS6Q

Length: 50min 59sec (3059 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020