As someone who greatly prefers text over audio (I just can’t absorb information unless I read it), I’ve decided to start typing up the content of the podcasts and putting them on a free wordpress site. I’m going in reverse order, and who knows if I’ll ever get to all of them. But for now, I’ve got the first 13 minutes of the last podcast typed up. I’m just working on it during my breaks at work, so it’ll be updated rather slowly. But I do hope it helps some of you who are like me and just prefer reading as opposed to listening
Be aware the site right now is using a default, ugly as hell theme. For some reason it won’t let me edit the theme from my iPad, so it’ll have to wait until I get home. Also, Ron, you say “you know” more often than Franklin does haha. As it goes on, I stop typing word for word everyone’s verbal tics, and just start omitting them for ease of reading. Except the "you know"s haha.
Just a few days ago I was wondering if there are tools that automatically transcribe an audio file. That would be handy and even if these applications are never perfect, they would at least increase the speed of a manual transcription.
If something like that exists, it would definately make this easier haha. Currently I have my iPad up and keyboard, and I type as I listen. The podcast through iTunes is cool because if i pause it, it plays from a second before I hit pause. So it makes it easier to transition between pausing. It also has a “go back 15 seconds” button which is incredibly useful for proofreading.
I like doing tedious tasks though, so I don’t mind it at all. Gives me something to do when I’m bored at work haha
I’ve downloaded all the podcasts and compressed them with a speech codec (OPUS at 12 kbps, the losses in the voice parts are almost unnoticeable unless you head them with headphones), so they all take around 110MB… Would that be useful for anyone?
I can see it all coming together: “Thimbleweed Park Standup Meeting Podcasts Reenacted - The Off-Broadway Musical featuring the original score by Steve Kirk”!
Thank you very much.
Even if I love to listen to the podcast, sometimes I couldn’t understand every word.
Your work is really appreciated and helpful for non-native english people!
Yeah it’s the same engine actually used in the speech-to-text applications, on Android devices (when you push the mic icon). It works well, 95% accurate, at least with Italian language.
Don’t know if it’s of value or not, but I wrote a tool that looks similar to oTranscribe called Transcriberer. One thing it does that I can’t see indications of oTranscribe doing is allows for slowing down and speeding up playback, which can be super helpful when multiple people are talking fast at once.
Summary
I originally made it for transcribing an interview with Tim, and used it for a subsequent interview with Ron
I actually did try an automatic “speech-to-text” program early on when the Podcasts came out. The results were … interesting. It did identify different speakers, but there was a LOT of errors, like every other sentence. It may be that there are much higher quality tools than I used that actually work, but I would say with the tool I used, it would be less work just to do the transcription by hand, than to clean up the output. I’ll see if I can find the files from my experiment…
I guess it wasn’t that early on, it was Podcast #49 I tried, and I used the tool “PopUpArchive”. I gave the speakers names, and merged some of the independant speakers it thought it heard where I seemed wrong. Here is a bit from the top of the transcription:
Transcript for file: Podcast_49.mp3
00:00:12
Ron Gilbert
I
00:00:12
Ron Gilbert
know this is wrong gilbert and welcome to the weekly cimbali park stand. Meeting pod cast. And as always i am joined by david fox head there. And gary winnick. Hello. So let’s start with. David david. What did you do last weekend when are you
00:00:28
David Fox
doing this week. Ok well see. Ron was gone. Last week. So lots of time to do lots of bug fixes. But not sure whether the all. We’re good or not since we have been have been getting new governors every day. Hopefully i’m expecting now to get a whole bunch of. Reports back that he broke something else when i took some thanks i will find out what’s a new art. New animation. I think my favorite things probably putting and. Some really clear mission that takes a place or something which is just a placeholder for god. I could match with the are now but there
00:01:02
Ron Gilbert
are great call. Well the two the really two really cool animation
00:01:06
Garry Winnick
that we are you know which one are you talking about both every animation that goes in is really you know that you have to think these are
00:01:16
David Fox
exceptionally cool and i doubt. In there and. We swung away just like kelly yeah. Kartik.
00:01:24
Ron Gilbert
You know and it was that the animation that’s thirty years in
00:01:27
David Fox
the making and fortunately. No it was for from posting it was play testing. And i just put the idea and. Didn’t test and they’re late and he tried something and. It wasn’t supposed to work yet. But it did. Kind of health thing without the right animation and just like that. Thing happened. That he was going to test and it just broke. So i said. Don’t. Don’t go in there. And then you’re being really like what are you talking about.
