[MV] Trouble transcriping from tape recorder

[Chuck Rogers]

Lorin (and everyone else):

You can't use a tape recording for transcription. Tapes introduce  
tape hiss, which will cause all sorts of problems with speech  
recognition.

 From our Knowledgebase:

"All speech recognition programs (both Macintosh-based and Windows- 
based) which support transcription from an audio file have the  
following limitations:

* There must be only one voice in the audio file. To speech  
recognition software the audio file is just so much data. The program  
has no way telling when different people are speaking, or switching  
between voice profiles.

* There must be a matching voice profile for the person speaking in  
the recording. Without a matching voice profile iListen has no proper  
references to compare the incoming audio against.

* The person speaking must say any necessary punctuation such as  
commas, periods, question marks, et cetera. Spoken punctuation is  
necessary to provide additional context for the words.

* It is not a tape recording; tape hiss causes too much distortion.

Unless all these criteria are met you cannot get usable recognition  
accuracy.

iListen has specific requirements as to audio file format as well.

* The audio file is in either AIFF or WAV format with these  
characteristics: 16-bit mono, uncompressed, and a sampling frequency  
of 16KHz.

[Note: an exception to this is the digital recorders we support which  
use a sampling frequency of 11KHz.]

The support for transcription from audio files is designed solely to  
allow an individual to dictate text while away from the computer and  
have this dictation transcribed at a later date."

All that having been said, you later say you are using an Olympus  
recorder purchased from us, which would be a digital recorder. Lorin,  
I typically do a demonstration of transcription in my presentations  
on speech recognition in Apple retail stores, and have never  
experienced any of the behaviors you are describing.

Best Regards,

Chuck Rogers

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On Jul 28, 2005, at 6:43 AM, LorinH at aol.com wrote:

> Hello.  Has anyone had problems transcribing a digital tape  
> recording of
> dictation as an AIFF file to iListen and a word processing  
> document?  I have had
> endless trouble (even with the latest release) with the dictation  
> from the AIFF
> file not appearing in the word processing document window, after many
> unsuccessful attempts, often even after many restarts of all  
> programs. Sometimes text
> appears in the "I heard" floating window, and as often it does not;  
> with no
> text appearing in TextEdit, MS Word , documents;  - (often the "I  
> heard"
> dialogue box never appears itself).
>
> And has anyone had trouble with the Correction Window text "jumping  
> around"
> skipping portions of the AIFF file and at all times losing tracking  
> of the
> voice playback -- the dictation playback audio source being found  
> several lines
> away from the dictated sentences or repeating the first lines over  
> and over?
>
> I have not been able to use ilisten with the Olympus tape recorder  
> purchased
> with iListen for the nearly two years I have owned them.  Any ideas?
>
> Chuck has asked that I send in an Aiff file for tech support to try  
> to figure
> it out.  I have not had time to do that as yet.  It takes many  
> hours in any
> attempt to transcribe one short tape.
>
> (Chuck, sorry this has not been accomplished yet.  The bugs I have  
> outlined
> with you have never changed.  I have simply stopped using the  
> program until I
> have the time to work this out.  I just want to keep this case in  
> the loop.
> Nothing has changed.}
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Lorin
>
> lorinh at aol.com
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