Open Source Transcription Software?

sshirley writes "I am beginning to do some interviews with family members and will do some audio journals for genealogy purposes. I would really love to be able to run the resulting MP3 or WAV files through some software a get a text file out. I know that software like this exists commercially. But does this exist in the open source world?"

Comments

Sphinx

[SaXisT4LiF]

Carnegie Mellon has an open source speech recognition project you might want to look into. Sphinx

But Windows Speech Recognition...

[Monkeedude1212]

Most Windows Vista or Win7 machines come with a built in transcribing feature, that you can enable in the control panel (Win7, under ease of access, Speech recognition).

However - the only way it works properly is if you train it to understand you personally. You load your profile, and it'll run you through a whole bunch of test sentences. The FULL test takes you about 20 minutes I think (It's been a while since I've used it) - and actually works quite well. There is a cut off point at about 2 and a half minutes if you want to stop and try it out. It actually makes it keyboard and mouseless if you want. When you open a browser it highlights everything on the web page thats clickable and assigns it a number, and you simply say "Click 7" and it hits the reply button for you. Then you talk when the textbox has focus and it'll transcribe every word you say.

I did this for my girlfriend's paper once, I read it aloud (you have to mention things like comma, end paragraph, etc) and put it into a Word document. Out of a 15 page single spaced Essay - it got 3 sentences wrong - and that's only because I was mentioning some of the more Obscure greek names (she's a history major). It managed to get full sentences regarding Octavia and her fondness of libraries without error, which I thought was odd since thats not a name you hear every day.

Anyways - if he wants to do this, he should record the test phrases (there will be a lot though) and have each of his interviewees read the test sentences so he can then relay those through the computer and train the computer for each person.

All in all - he may still run across a few errors, but its not nearly as bad as say Google Voice Mail, which tries to figure out what you're saying without having any previous knowledge on how that person speaks. Windows Speech Recognition is something that will handle what he's after though.

Re:I've wondered about this too

[Enuratique]

Google relies on Twilio for their audio transcription.

I looked, but still do it manually

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I've worked on loooads of transcripts. I did most of these:

* http://wiki.fsfe.org/Transcripts

The best technique I've found is to have mplayer play the audio at 60% normal speed and have a text editor (emacs is my preference) in another window, flick between them with alt-TAB and hit Space to start and pause mplayer.

Re:CMU Sphinx

[Narksos]

What you want is dictation software. I just (last week) spent significant time looking in to this.

For open source you have two main options: CMU Sphinx and Julius/Julian. Both options are just back-ends, you'll have to write a front-end. However, it shouldn't be too hard to do that (the source for the CMU Sphinx demos show how to get input from a mic/wav file (if you've got something other than PCM you'll just need to convert it) and set up various engines.

CMU Sphinx appears to be mainly for research purposes. You can run it in a few different modes: one with a fixed grammar (for command systems, Gnome's voice control uses sphinx in this mode), one (what you'd be looking for) uses a weighted dictionary. I didn't train it to my voice (and you wont be able to train it for transcriptions) and I was getting fairly lousy recognition rates with my $20 Logitech USB Microphone. It might work better with a high quality headset, but I imagine you wont both be wearing one.

Julius/Julian lacks a good acoustic model for English. VoxForge is working on one, but it isn't anywhere near complete.

Here is a good article that sums up the current projects

the command line

[ciaran_o_riordan]

To play an audio file at 60% normal speed:

mplayer -af scaletempo=scale=0.6 the_file.ogg

And then to check the transcript, change the 0.6 to 1.5 (or 2.0 for someone like Richard Stallman who speaks slowly and clearly).

Foot Pedal and Express Scribe best option

[Adattisi]

I've been a transcriptionist for over 5 years, and unless you want to have to retype most of it yourself anyway, don't offer pennies on a site like guru/vworker/elance. A decent transcriptionist is going to charge at least $45-50 per AUDIO hour (not hours it takes) if it's a good, clear recording & a single speaker. If there was a really great product out there, I'd be out of a job. If you want to do it on the cheap, get an inexpensive USB Infinity foot pedal (on ebay) as mentioned before & Express Scribe is a free download to playback & rewind the audio. Both are what I use. Good luck!

Re:Dear aunt,

[painandgreed]

Seriously, transcribe it manually... automatic speech recognition just doesn't work. And can never work, because much of the time the only reason humans can understand each other is by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.

Funny, considering my job is training doctors to use voice recognition to do all their reporting. Actually, it works fairly well. I also don't mean dictating something that goes to transcriptionists. The doctors dictate the report. The dictation is transcribed into text. They review it and sign off. We got rid of all our transcriptionists years ago. The time for a report to get done went from 24 hours with transcriptionists to 24 minutes with voice recognition. The amount of errors was cut in half. The doctor's work load was also lessened as they could check the final version while still dealing with the data rather than having to go back and review everything all over again a day or two later. Speech recognition was a problem seven years ago, but hardly at all in the last five or so. Yes, the have to go over their dictations and occasionally make some minor corrections. There's always background noise to worry about and some people's accents are hard even for another person to get through, but for things that require quick turn around and need to be verified by the person who is doing it, voice recognition already is the gold standard.

PS several of the doctors like it so well they bought Dragon (pretty much everybody but Phillips use Dragon for their speech engine) for home and use it there for all their email and other writing.

Re:CMU Sphinx

[Bacon Bits]

Both options are just back-ends, you'll have to write a front-end. However, it shouldn't be too hard to do that

"... unless you're not a programmer."

Seriously, since when is "program it yourself" a solution to "are there any open source software packages that do what I want?"? The answer you're looking for is "no". That's the correct answer.

Here, here's a nice car analogy since we're on Slashdot: when you need a car do you buy a kit car, or do you buy one factory built? This is like telling someone who wants a car to drive to work that they should simply buy Chevy big block engine and build the rest from scratch. Just because I need a car doesn't mean I must be an automotive engineer and metal fabricator. Similarly, just because I need dictation software doesn't make me a software architect or a linguist. Directing this person to program their own software is not answering the question.

Cripes. People wonder where the "open source is only free if your time has no value" line came from.