Eric,
I tried Docsoft:AV (http://www.docsoft.com/Products/AV/), a server-based
solution, about a year ago to see whether we could use it to automatically
transcribe and timestamp our oral history recordings. It might work nicely if
you had multiple recordings with the same speakers where it would be feasible
to train the software by setting up speaker profiles for the individual
speaker's voice. The software can output the results in a variety of formats
and it handles audio and video recordings.
However, we only had one recording per interviewee (intermixed with the
interviewer) and thus would have had to spend way more time and money on
training the software (and cleaning up the results, which were hardly
comprehensible) than if we had an actual person listen to the recordings and
transcribe them. To be fair to Docsoft, some speakers had strong accents and
the audio quality was not ideal, but that's what we needed it for.
So, it did not seem to be a feasible solution for this particular problem and
we stuck with a wetware-based approach.
Markus
Markus Wust
Digital Collections and Preservation Librarian
Digital Scholarship and Publishing Center
North Carolina State University Libraries
