Group: AutomaticTranscription

Automatic transcription is an FSF Priority Project. We need free software that is capable of transcribing recordings. YouTube is starting to offer this service, but this is a kind of computing we should be doing on our systems with free software.

If you are interested, please join this group (start by leaving your name here). We should start by surveying any existing free software that is in or close to this area, and making a list of features that are needed.

[UniversalSubtitles.org] is not automated, but provides great user interface for creating transcriptions & subtitles for online video (an audio). Ideal for public content. It is a collaborative platform (one could call it a "wiki with an ui dedicated to subtitling").

CMU Sphinx might be usable for transcription. If I (cwebber) remember correctly, there was some effort to look into video transcription for PyCon using CMU Sphinx, but it didn't become production ready.

seems like mostly a "GUI problem"; shouldn't it be possible to clone universalsubtitles and run sphinx on the audio track of whatever video is uploaded to create a first-pass transcription? After that, the main problem is creating LM's for new languages, but that's an upstream issue …

I think simon might be worth a look when considering speech recognition solutions. It may focus on command and control right now but the underlying technology should allow for dictation with the right speech model. In that regard, I'd also like to point to Voxforge. (Disclaimer: I am a developer of simon)

long comment from dimid

What we needed is Automatic Voice Recognition.
For english we need word to phonetic symbols converter. Other languages like japanese, german or greek don't need that.

With Ecasound and LADSPA filters we do preprocessing of the sound with scripts, we use the filters: noise gate, compressor, filters and reverb.
With Aegisub we can create karaoke of speeches with scripts, so we can use karaoke for the training of Automatic Voice Recognition.

Sphinx need a GUI for easy configuration and train. Plus we need to split lexicon and grammar data from the voice recognition and make them interface. Every language works different.
Alternative is PRAAT where we can do voice analysis with small scripts, even with noise. But we need a pattern match algorithm for that, probably with R or Python-scipy.
The problem with Sphinx is the pitch recognition, with PRAAT we can do something like sing recognition(voice to musical notes) or recognize the same "A" from a kid or someone who mimics voices.
Other problems are the vowels, "A" from a chinese and "A" in english aren't the same. If the say half minute "A" they sound the same, but when they used in words they are different. Other letters like "P","T" are the same.

General automatic transcription works little different for each language.

"software" is not in the list (interest, location, project, school) of allowed values for the "Organized around" property.