softwear

[Dave]

Hi Lads

Is there any softwear available to convert an audio file into a word document?

My Mrs is doing Her Masters and has to transcribe 20 hours of interviews

just wanted something to to dump the basic text into word so she can sort it out from there??

Dave

[bhouse]

I have yet to find any software that's more than about 50% accurate.

As a result, we always use human transcribers. There's a very good online agency we use called UK Transcription. They're run by a very friendly chap called Chris Dubery. It'll cost you but I suspect it'll end up being cheaper than any software that actually does the job properly.

[Blatman]

Dragon software is supposed to be pretty good. We discussed audio (voice rather than a recording though) to text in this thread last month...

[bhouse]

Dragon is about as good as it gets with a success rate in our tests of between 20% and 50% accuracy depending on accent, background noise etc for a first pass.  If you can train it for one particular voice it does get much more accurate. The problem with interviews is that you don't have the time or the material to train it for each voice.

[Blatman]

Run the audio through it more than once? Or does it need lots and lots of different words rather than the same words repeated?

The Olympus gadget I linked to in the earlier thread looks good, if the advert is to be believed...

[bhouse]

It really needs to listen to the same voice. Every time it gets a word wrong you correct it and it learns - pretty fast, all things considered.

We're in the same boat as Mrs Dave though - we often film 10 or so interviews at half an hour each and then have to get them transcribed to help with the edit. And with accents ranging from Venezuelan to Geordie it just gives up the ghost.

Here's a recent example.

Dragon version:

How we we as houses a company and we the Italian army said troops were stunned when universities as well as in all our papers were attending her gave her a Terry care monitor ring unit

What was actually said:

We ourselves as a company, we originally in our research - which was done with the University of New South Wales - all our papers were on a telecare monitoring unit

So it's showing promise - but generally means you have to go through the entire thing again to correct it.

[Dave]

Cheers Lad's

Thats got the mrs off my case,

she just needs to type properly  

(he says using 2 fingers   )

Dave