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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