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

Dear aunt,

[Anonymous Coward]

let's set so double the killer delete select all.

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.

Sphinx

[SaXisT4LiF]

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

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

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.