audio to text software

[Craig Brooksby]

> TIA, and please pardon my laziness.

>  There are only individual citizens
>  with individual wills
>  and individual purposes."

Did anyone else find the combination of those two statements too
funny??  :-)  (all in good fun)

> I have tape recorded interviews, and I want to create transcripts of them.

Limiting the discussion to speech-to-text software that anyone can buy
(i.e., excluding what the CIA uses) it can be very good.  Two major
limitations are:

a) It is sensitive to the microphone.  A bad mic (or a bad tape
recording) can wreck the whole enterprise.  If your recordings are
muddy, you are in trouble.

b) It must be trained to the individual speaker.  This means that you
will spend a few hours correcting it, until it gets the idisyncracies
of your voice.  You do this by responding to text it displays for you
to read.

I have no idea how you would train it to a voice that is not you, but
only on tape.  The person on tape can't respond to the training
script.  (Unless that person is you).  You may have to resort to "the
collective" to find out how that is done (if at all).

Even after training, you need to listen along and edit / correct when
it gets things wrong.

I doubt there is *any* software commercially available that you can
just start playing a tape to, and it starts typing out the transcript.
 This kind of software is still very speaker-specific.

I now dissolve back into the collective and lose my individual identity.  (poof)