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On 12/06/2012 10:03 AM, Beartooth
wrote:
People I know are forever sending URLs that are just talking heads. I don't do talking heads. But iiuc there is now software that transcribes speech, though I don't know how well. Would it then not be possible to write software that would go to a site and transcribe what is said there? Even if it could do only one speaker, it could save a lot of us a lot of time. Dragon Dictate, and Dragon Naturally Speaking, have been on the commercial (that is, shrink-wrap) market for a very long time. They transcribe your speech. You sit at the console, hook up a microphone, and first read a Mark Twain short story. Then you can speak into the microphone, and the Dragon program will produce machine-readable text, in your word processor, from what you say. I have not used Dragon for thirteen years. Back then, all I really had was Windows. (Linux was then in its infancy and was little more than a command-line implementation of Unix. The rich X system was only just then getting started.) Also back then, I had to speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Like, one syllable per second, or even one syllable every two seconds. Processors in those days were simply not fast enough for Dragon to keep up with, say, someone delivering a speech to a crowded lecture venue. Today, they might be. That is, the Intel Core i7, or whatever equivalent AMD might have produced, might be. All I know is that Dragon have started to advertise on cable television, something they never did before. And they are pitching this program to housewives who think they might want to break into novel-writing. Ask any novelist; novel-writing is a very text-intensive thing to do. Three problems: 1. I'm still skeptical that even a modern processor can keep up with someone's natural pace of speech. Today the ads say that Dragon produces smooth word-processing documents and e-mails "three times faster than most people type." But: can they create that text as fast as most people talk? And do they mean three times faster than a professional office secretary can type? (The typical standard was about sixty words a minute on an old-fashioned impact typewriter. That's about as fast as I had to slow my speech to, thirteen years ago, when Dragon was still new.) 2. I have never seen an open-source implementation, version, or equivalent of Dragon. Nor has Dragon, to my knowledge, ported their software to Linux. They've ported it to Mac, and I've seen it offered as "shareware" (with a $99 suggested "license" fee). 3. I have never seen any claim that Dragon, or anything like it, can produce a transcript of a video. Even to implement that would be a challenge. Or it might not be: no one has explained to me what steps Dragon takes to produce text. If it writes your spoken words to a temporary file and then transcribes the file as soon as you speak it (within reason), then it just might be able to transcribe an existing recorded speech, on audio or video. All it would have to do is recognize the codec. (Or else you convert your audio file to a codec that the transcription program can recognize.) Now about your talking-head issue: if you've reached an advertisement, you might be able to get an instant transcript this way: 1. Navigate to the page. 2. As soon as the talking head starts talking, hit a button to close out the page. 3. A dialog will appear: "Are you sure you want to leave?" Hit "Cancel." The page will still be there, only now you will see a printed transcript. You should then be able to select, copy and paste. I know you can still read it all. I've done it a few times. This is a good question, actually. I'd love to see a "build" of something like Dragon. But that development might be way beyond the scope of the Fedora project. Temlakos |
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