I'm embarking on exactly the same thing, and for films as well. Depending on the fidelity of your recording you will get different results using Premier Pro in the Adobe Creative Suite 4/5. For modern (2009 recordings) high-fidelity audio we only got 80% accuracy.
Dragon still does not work in Keith's scenario. Dragon works ok if you are echoing recorded speech, that is if you repeat the recording using your voice. The production rate is a little bit better than that of a novice typer, so if you have an army of students you might make some headway. I vowed never to attempt this again after echoing a 60 minute film. In the end we are outsourcing the bulk of our transcriptioning. John -----Original Message----- From: Keith Jenkins [mailto:k...@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 2:47 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] audio transcription software I tried Dragon Naturally Speaking a couple of years ago. (After breaking a wrist in a cycling accident, I figured it might be easier than one-hand typing, which wasn't true in the case of typing programming code with lots of curly brackets, indentation, etc.) Speech-to-text software works best after a training session, in which the software asks the speaker to read a known text, to calibrate the software. I'm not sure how it might work to calibrate for voices on recordings, but it may be that the software can learn during a proof-reading process. Your success for oral history recordings may depend on the uniqueness of each speakers voice, and the length of each recording. (Lots of short recordings of many different speakers would tend to be harder.) Keith On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <emor...@nd.edu> wrote: > Does anybody here use or know of any audio transcription software? > > We have a growing number of projects here at Notre Dame that include oral > histories. How can these digital files be converted into plain text? Audio > transcription software may be the answer? > > -- > Eric Lease Morgan > University of Notre Dame >
