Earth Notes: Soundwalk - an hour on the Cambridge Road Estate (2020-09-12)

The text up to Enjoy! was pre-scripted (ie read, not transcribed), and the standard canned 5-year-PV and welcome intro segment was inserted.

I then transcribed from 00:54 to about 01:22 by hand.

I searched for "transcribe English MP3" and a number of options were available to try.

Sonix

I chucked the whole MP3 at the free 30-minute transcription trial at sonix.ai: Fully-automated transcription that's fast, accurate, and affordable. Ad hoc transcription is USD10 per hour (the 'standard' plan).

That brought up a request for High quality audio and a Warning: Low accuracy potential. There is indeed a lot of background noise, multiple speakers, etc!

But I ploughed on!

I was then informed that my file was 1h and 32s and would require payment, rather than just getting the first 30 minutes...

So I extracted the first 30 minutes from after "Enjoy!" as a full quality MP3 and tried again.

This time no warning about "low accuracy potential", and the audio is reported as 29m 57s by Sonix while transcribing it.

The Sonix site chewed at my text for several minutes.

I was emailed a link to see/edit the transcript. I was told on-screen that Sonix was very confident about ~72%, fairly ~20% and slightly ~8%.

I get the option to download in several formats, including text, with the options to insert timecodes every paragraph or 30s for example. I did this before any attempt to tidy up on line with the tools provided.

The plain text Sonix transcript of the 30 minutes is ~19kB.

My manual transcription of the opening paragraph was:

My walk is called "Walk with Jane", and Jane Jacobs is [is] the person that I'm really looking at [her] through this prism because she was [she was] a journalist. But a lot of people think she was an architect. But she was really a kind of polymath. So, she wrote "The Death and Life of American Cities".

Sonix produced:

Because she was she was a journalist, but a lot of people think she was an architect, but she was really a kind of polymath. So she wrote the death and life of. It is OK, but that's the kind of change change and you can go and change school anywhere in the world, although she was American and she ended up in Canada and she thought Robert Moses was a great motivator and he liked to build his roads through books because he was the obvious place. It was open space, you know, needed to build.

Definitely not perfect, and continuing on beyond where I had the first paragraph end. It would require a lot of work to get into shape, but likely still better than a manual process from start to finish.

Vocalmatic

Vocalmatic also offers 30 minutes for free, so I'll try it on the second half of the soundwalk! (Well, from [30:00] for about 30 minutes.) This nominally overlaps a little with the Sonix test.

Vocalmatic seems to be saying that transcribing one minute of audio will take one minute. This was probably about right for my 30m test!

Vocalmatic claimed that my 30m was 31m, so I made a 29.5m one instead!

I was asked to select the language (English, United Kingdom), and choose a format (default, or SRP to be a video caption/subtitle). I went with default.

Ad hoc transcription is GBP29 for ten hours as of 2020-09-23.

When my transcription was ready I had a choice to export as a Word Doc, or a text. I tried the latter, but the] exported form omits the timing marks.

[0:00:01-0:04:33]

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Here is the overlapping transcription segment from Sonix:

[00:29:10] We're going to mix up with a little bit of trees as well. So we're going to show.

[00:29:15] Well, thank you.

[00:29:19] But I just want to point out post New York Post link. And in that poll, a lot of the references came from him because he was one of the original investors and his I think his mom, who was born in the cottagers, and he used to talk about running errands. There used to be two scrap metal merchants on Tuesday and they would take bits and pieces so they'd get money for it. And if there's any change, they'd go to the ice cream parlor. And he said that the ice cream parlor.