May 08, 2005

Curious George: Calling all couputer monkeys! Can you hope me please? I need an inexpensive wav to text program. Does such a thing exist out there?

After typing my fingers bloody transcribing the last week, I'm wondering if there is a wav to text program out there that is cheap or free. I've tried to download a couple freebies and seven day free trials, but neither Mr. BlueHorse or I can make them work. One tells me it will only do 16 bit mono (these files must be stereo) and the other refuses to find a speech engine. Isn't that what MS Speech SDK 5.1 is? I'm using Switch to convert dvf files to wav, and then playing them in Olympus, if that matters. I know there's only about seventy percent accuracy, but at this point, my carpal tunnel would be grateful for anything. Please speak slowly. Use small words and exaggerated mouth movements so that I can understand.Thank you.

posted by BlueHorse 19 years ago
  • I'm not familiar with any free speech transcription program. The only program that might be of any yse is a program like Atlas.ti which allows you to "bookmark" certain portions of an audio file and lable them with something related to the content which would save some time and you wouldn't have to transcribe everything. You could just have the segments categorized by the topic and not have to transcribe the portions that don't seem pertinent. Of course I'm not sure what the purpose of the recordings is, so tht might not be usefull (and atlas.ti isn't the most intuitive software either, so it might be more of a hassle to learn to use it than just transcription of everything).
  • Squids: Me sorry. Bad banana. Was hoping that someone, somewhere, somehow, would tell me there was hope. Back to the typing. If anyone has any spare or unused monkeys, send them my way. It ain't Shakespeare, though.
  • Was hoping that someone, somewhere, somehow, would tell me there was hope. BlueHorse There is hope, just not on the immediate horizon. Despite the puffery from IBM, their program is still not very accurate (for me, accurate would be in the 99% range, and that is still nowhere near six sigma reliabliltiy). Nearly thirty years ago, I proposed an instantaneous language translator via computer interface in an engineering class & got laughed at (ok maybe it was the hat)--and now that is fairly common technology. Because of W3C standards, type to talk (for the sight impaired) is getting better all the time as is the talk to type. Can your project wait another 5 years? The technology should be better then...
  • MonkeyFilter: Can your project wait another 5 years? The technology should be better then... Sorry GramMa - don't know of a program but what about one of the standard speech-to-text programs and you'd listen to the .wav file, repeat it into the microphone and voila text?
  • Oh, pete, I'm so cornfused. If I could do it that way, then why couldn't the computer talk to itself out loud and type the damn thing for me while I go take a shower?