I use the latest Dragon, and I've found it light-years ahead of
anything else I've ever tried. But I did need to "train" it with a
half hour or so of reading a speech, and it's not 100 per cent
accurate, especially with unusual words.
Based on my experience, here's a few of suggestions:
1. You'll probably find that your respondents belong to several
general dialect groups. Find a speaker who is as close as possible
to each of these groups, and have THEM "train" the software. (BTW,
IU Bloomington is very strong in language departments; you might
kidnap a few linguists from there to help you sort out the dialect
groups of your speakers. I'm speaking as a former instructor at
IUPUI who used to go down to Bloomington all the time to use the
library there.)
2. Double-check the quality of your recordings before trying
Dragon. You do need pretty distinct vocalizations for good results
with Dragon; with poor quality recordings, you probably won't get
very good results. Voice recognition software does very interesting
things with indistinct speech and even incidental noises. (I once
had some voice recognition software "transcribe" a thunderstorm. I
turned off the computer as soon as I came back into the room, so I'll
never know just what the thunderstorm had to say.)
3. Even with almost perfectly "trained" software, you'll still
find lots of errors. You'll need to have somebody proofread your
Dragon transcripts.
--Constance Warner
On Aug 2, 2007, at 9:55 AM, David Turk wrote:
Here's the set-up: We have hundreds of oral histories on cassette
tape. I've successfully transferred some of these to CD using
Audacity (freeware). We have several people transcribing these
histories so we have written copies. Is there some speech
recognition software we could use to for transcribing? I know it's
not perfect, 7 might not work well with recorded voices, but
thought I'd ask. We're looking at years of transcribing by hand.
tia.
david
David Turk
Photographer
Indiana Historical Society
450 W. Ohio St.
Indianapolis, IN 46202
(317) 232-4592
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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