Hey everyone! I haven’t updated the one I was typing (I did it during lunch breaks at work, and work has been so hectic I’ve been working through all my breaks…). i’ll finish the podcast I started as soon as I can, then look into all these programs for the next ones. I quite enjoy typing it from scratch though, I enjoy tedious things B)
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Nice work.
I supose that there is more people like me, that can read English, but can´t barely understand the spoken English.
Thanks !!!
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I just finished listening to all the podcasts in backwards order, and there are some very funny and interesting parts there that might be easier to find back once transcribed. Anyway, if you want I can help out by transcribing starting from ep. 1 and we’ll meet in the middle? Or I just pick a few of the funny/intersting ones and do those first?
Let me know…
Make sure you transcribe Pepp too!
I’m interested! It would be great if you could upload them. Thanks
Hey. Sorry, I hadn’t particularly worked on it since my last post. I lost a lot of momentum on it due to lack of interest from commenters, as well as David pointing out that its probably just better for a transcribing program to do the work, rather than typing by a person. I was initially typing it up during my free time between school and work, but I’ve sort of just… stopped. Haha.
If there’s enough interest, I might just finish the first podcast I started on, and do one or two more that people particularly want to see in text form. But I’ve lost the drive to do every single one. If anyone else wants to pick up the project, go right ahead, I’ll give you access to the fansite I made where I posted it all
I was waiting for a reply from @thimblecon… I’ll start transcribing tomorrow…
I’ll post here when the first is done and we’ll see how to continue from then on. I do not intend to use automatic transcription software though. We’ll see…
Transcribed the first half of the first podcast… should be finished tomorrow
I will be enormously grateful for this work!
It’s a really huge amount of work. I think, it would be way more efficient to limit it to essential contents, funny jokes and interesting anecdotes, instead of translating literally everything.
I’m suggesting a Best Of in written form. This would be time-saving for the readers as well.
It is huge, indeed.
I think nobody should do it the old way, why did you exclude the use of the software?
I’ve tried to convert the very last podcast episode with two speech-to-text translators. I used the “English US” phonetic databases.
The result of Pocketsphinx looks like this:
Pocketshpinx
if the ang to and now why is recovered it would come to the weekly public works damned of me being broadcast courses we quit doing friday question satanic the ball so possibly be the last part as we do for the boy park
so i’m i’m joined by a carrier when it comes to low
and david fox in their solution of a moment of silence for the very last part that’s all
mix in decent and twenty cents on an i drop crying and cardiac that shit for missing the the intent behind 'em up silence to whatever the fuck today
that very so you when that amazing of reddit questions to do from people’s lives
possibly be along part of schools will bother questions and i’m reading today
so show which is good started thirty do you do you have anything in the same for adults first first call it’s the shift that could be the low last contest is for first blood vessels the game show that to which i think or other questions are and always the questions are person that you’re mentally warn about spoilers and
that yeah it is but as is filled with spoilers or god couldn’t make it any attempt to hide any spoilers so if you haven’t played the game continued trying to keep everything secret them it’s our best novices broadcast in the u up with him
right
so brenda
our red phantom asks how much of the boot park was playboy wire frame before the real art was added in the period usually do every room in order for it on my sinks and we ah i’m did a great deal of monopoly we didn’t know what every single little as we first little air frames ah and then worked up over i don’t think he did 'em
…
And the result of Premiere Pro (video edting software) looks like this:
Premiere Pro, with meta-data
2849 250 well 17
4039 8219 Speaker 1 -1
5619 510 soon 34
8399 299 the 19
12259 11029 Speaker 2 -1
12329 179 what 16
12659 280 is 42
12939 190 right 52
13129 140 to 34
13539 130 be 9
13669 340 welcomed 41
14009 99 to 76
14139 99 the 32
14239 380 weekly 60
14899 210 we 60
15429 370 stand 45
15799 149 at 33
15949 380 meeting 40
17489 110 of 35
17599 310 course 30
17909 199 this 42
18109 210 week 59
18319 429 recruiting 36
18749 380 Friday 58
19129 729 questions 40
19889 550 and 45
20649 539 also 60
21399 659 possibly 44
22059 310 be 50
22399 250 the 59
22679 590 last 50
23289 13589 Speaker 3 -1
23299 650 podcast 34
23949 120 be 33
24069 179 to 63
24249 210 fit 51
24459 130 the 32
24589 229 bully 49
24819 510 Park 39
…
So both tools are producing unusable results. Has anybody ideas how to improve the output or suggestions for other tools?
I would be curious to see what the Google technology can do with it, for example uploading a podcast as a video to YouTube and extracting the captions automatically created by the platform.
Yes, that would be very interesting. Several free speech recognition tools are using the Google API, but they don’t take a file as input (at least the tools I’ve found). I can’t upload the podcast to YouTube - but maybe someone else? 
I did a little research into tools, and decided to try Sonix. It offers 1 hour of free transcription, but is otherwise not free. But I was curious if the technology was good enough. I tried the final podcast (#67) - just the first 15 minutes- also, and actually was pretty impressed with the result. The only edit I made was to change “Speaker 1” to Ron Gilbert, and “Speaker 2” to Gary Winnick. It would still require some editing to clean it up though, and I’m not sure how long that would take, compared to manual transcription. To use this tool would be $15/mo + $8/hr of transcription.
Podcast #67 First 15 min (transcribed by Sonix)
Podcast 67 First 15 min.mp3
Ron Gilbert: [00:00:12] Ron Gilbert and welcome to the weekly family park standup meeting podcast. Of course this week we’re doing friday questions and it could also possibly be the last podcast we do for Boyd park. So I am joined by Kerry Winik. Hello. And David Fox so maybe we should have a moment of silence for the very last podcast.
Gary Winnick: [00:00:38] Sad sad sad. I drop crying. Oh yeah.
Ron Gilbert: [00:00:43] I think we’re missing the intent behind a moment of silence here but whatever. That’s OK. That’s OK. So anyway we got amazing Friday questions to do people answers might possibly be a long podcast because we have a lot of questions and I am reading today so we just get started. Do you have anything you’d like to say beforehand. First first part of it could be the last podcast but it’s for first podcast since the game shift. I think a lot of the questions are obviously questions are addressing that you are going to like warn about spoilers I guess. Yeah. This podcast is filled with spoilers. We’re not going to make any attempt to hide any spoilers so if you haven’t played the game and you’re trying to keep everything secret then it’s probably best to not listen to this podcast until you have played the game. All right let’s jump right into it. Read Fantham asks how much of the park was playable in wireframe before the real art was added in. Did Gary initially do every room in wireframe. I think that we did a great deal of them. We didn’t know what every single room was when we first doing the wire frames.
Ron Gilbert: [00:02:01] And then when Mark took over I don’t think he did as you know so in retrospect I would say we did probably like 80 percent of the rooms as wireframe or something like that. We dropped a whole bunch of them. That sounds about right. Yeah that’s about right now a lot of the wireframe rooms are in the ending of the game. I think most of the ones that we actually did cut into the ending. I think when Mark took over he didn’t really do wireframe as he did more of these black and white concept pieces. So we had a bunch of those but I decided not to put them into the finale just because there was so different from that original wireframe that I just wanted to keep it you know artistically consistent. So a lot of Mark’s black or white rooms didn’t make it in there but I think if you look at Gary’s wireframe Plus you know Mark’s black and white rooms I think pretty much the whole game was done that way.
Gary Winnick: [00:02:59] It was more likely that there were some rooms that we had in the game in wireframe at the time.
Ron Gilbert: [00:03:07] And I did put some of those into the game. There are a few I mean of all the rooms I could find I put in all of the cut rooms. That elites were in that wireframe art style. I think all of the cut rooms put into the game with you.
Gary Winnick: [00:03:21] I think there might be. There is a bank manager and there were sparks black and white rooms. Yeah that was Marg’s was all right.
Ron Gilbert: [00:03:30] Yeah and they and the county clerk’s office. Yeah that was all black and white that market hadn’t we didn’t do a wireframe with the county clerk or you know Gary didn’t do a wire for the county clerk’s office. But yeah I mean for the most part I mean we did you know do wire frames or white concepts of all the rooms and have them wired into the game.
Gary Winnick: [00:03:52] Mark merks black and white concepts were pretty heady rendered too. I mean they were they were pretty close to the final except not with all the shading and color.
Ron Gilbert: [00:04:01] Yeah I mean I think you know that was one of the things that the kind of the way that Mark really thought about art. He he really thought about it in a lot of detail so he didn’t do super rough concepts like Gary did which meant I kind of wished Mark had been able to do really rough stuff because I think we could have iterated but I think most of his stuff was you know 90 percent right to begin with so it wasn’t that big of a problem. And I think by the time Mark came on the project there were very few rooms that we cut from his stuff so very little of it was actually his stuff was very close. His final is very close to his and I call them wire frames or as you said black and whites I believe. I’m not going to say for sure that when we do the PTF or the the art of we’re going to show a bunch of that stuff too so people can be actually compare them then. All right. Tufano asks Is Doug based on a backer who pledged at that level. The answer to that is actually no. We had A caretaker. It was always I think at least in some of our earlier stuff and then we just tried a different bunch of different sort of approaches. He actually was a real ordinary looking guy. And then we kind of came up with this sort of shorter you know more. I mean he used the word stranger looking character that we all liked. And then the whole digging thing just kind of happened. I think David’s idea I can’t remember for sure.
Gary Winnick: [00:05:33] But I remember I remember his name originally was Sam. Right. Well he was I think he’s still called caretaker inside the code Nicole’s caretaker. I mean I think he named Sam from one of your earlier talks I got that from. It was like he was last name it definitely wasn’t Scottish. And when John did the playing cards she was naming all the characters and she just I don’t think she knew his name was Samms. She just came up with Doug you know.
Ron Gilbert: [00:06:02] I thought he was named Doug because we had originally put into the game in the name Sam and then Lauren when she hugged him right. Yeah. Lauren had to write some stuff in and she said Oh I think his name should be dugs. He’s digging All right. So that’s where he got the name tag.
Gary Winnick: [00:06:19] So someone asked just before about the Dig Dug reference and I think that is tied to that.
Ron Gilbert: [00:06:25] Yeah a little bit yeah yeah. So I think it was Lauren was the person that actually named named Doug. Doug Right. You’re right.
Gary Winnick: [00:06:33] And I think the idea from the brainstorming he was just going to be taking on the French. And then I think he had the idea to have him digging inside the house and then actually having him you know using the shovel to test the wall and to stay out the curtains and basically a shovel was all his tools to do everything there was to do but we just kept on digging inside.
Ron Gilbert: [00:07:01] Yeah. Just for animation there was animation workload issues right. I think he did start out as a much more normal character. And then when we started digging inside the house and then we had the strange Scottish accent. He just he turned into a much more bizarre character at that point. But I think you know the other thing was with Doug was there was a whole puzzel chain you know where you didn’t need to use him that involved a shovel and everything and that was all cut and we could’ve just cut Doug from the game at that point because he didn’t really serve a purpose but I think everybody kind of fallen in love with him by that point. And we just we just didn’t want to cut him.
Gary Winnick: [00:07:40] I should say that the. I think I know I wrote his little digging lines and stuff and it just felt flat and I felt like I was trying to write him as if he had a Scottish accent and doing a really bad job and then I ended up finding this Web site that would convert English text to Scottish and just use that completely to get this dialogue. And I had to put his dialogue in in the comments in English so we actually people the we sang for translation purposes.
Ron Gilbert: [00:08:11] Yeah I remember we were doing the recording for him. It’s like I had to go to the source go to a couple of times and read the comments and go OK this is what he’s actually saying. But I mean unfortunately we couldn’t get a real Scottish person to read him so it’s actually just you know a Canadian actor doing a really bad Scottish accent.
Gary Winnick: [00:08:33] Well I think Doug probably is certainly Scottish He just wants to watch Star Trek or something. All right Groundskeeper Willie.
Ron Gilbert: [00:08:41] He was questioned by some French mimes accent or whatever. Yeah but that’s OK. That mine was to be bad. I don’t feel too bad about that. All right next question is by Genna. I was wondering if the Bull Connor was cut down from the original idea as I recall there were discussions in the podcast of Dolores dressing up to attend and a few other concepts that didn’t make it into the final game. I think the only thing that was cut out was the thing about Dolores dressing up. I can’t remember can you remember anything else it was cut from the book. You know we we might have had some stuff that had more to do with conventions and comics and stuff but overall yeah overall is doing more Gangotri such things.
Gary Winnick: [00:09:24] And I think that we’ve talked at once about having two or is having like half a dozen different costumes for a bunch and every time he switched her or she be wearing something different concepts.
Ron Gilbert: [00:09:35] Yeah I think we were talking about was you know you were in a hotel you’d walk through the door and Dolores would be dressed normal. And when we cut the thimble on she would just be in her costume. It’s like she did this magical cause place which just walk into the door. But I think that was just a workload issue because you know costumes with you know this hand-drawn animation is like you really have to redraw all of Dolores with all the different costumes so I think that was just cut from from a workload issue. And I mean there was a puzzle where she had to go find a costume initially and I think we cut that just because it seemed too cumbersome. You know there was enough lead up to getting into trouble Courtney getting in there was important enough that you know we cut that because it just felt like it would it would drag it would drag the puzzle too much. So we cut it. All right. Craig field gamer. I miss the Kickstarter anyway. You’ll have the boxed collector’s edition in Murcia later on questionmark.
Ron Gilbert: [00:10:35] And the answer is yes we will. I think it’s in our FAQ and we do plan to have that for sale. The only difference is unlike the kickstarted one it’s not going to be signed but I believe that you could probably run down at some event he said and get him to sign it. He’ll do it for like 20 bucks or something like that. Yeah I don’t know if the box is going to be available for sale. So we’re still kind of working on that. Someone actually asked that I didn’t pull this coming out. I guess I forgot it but someone asked whether the cover of the box was going to be pixilated or whether the cover of the box was going to be you know a really nice painting. Yeah. And Ken MACKLIN The guy who did the media man should box he’s going to be painting the cover of the film box. So our goal with that box is to make it a very you know authentic you know 1980s 90s Lucasfilm style box.
Gary Winnick: [00:11:30] So it will have a nice painted cover and all the other things that can have that special because filmmaking is paper on the side of the marble.
Ron Gilbert: [00:11:39] Maybe not. It may you may not know that. I still remember when we were doing monkey island driving into San Francisco and going to this paper store and spending all this time with I think Doug Glenn was there you might have been there too Gary just just pulling paper trying to find that paper that went on them Monkey Island. That was like before the Internet where you could just pull up a google image search and find the paper. We actually did physically go to a store to find the paper. All right. Mike Kay wants to know how did the idea of the sheriff coroner and hotel managers speech tick come about. Was that something the voice actor or ad libbed or was that specifically written into the script. Reno Yeah those were all written into the script. You know the voice the voice actor didn’t didn’t do that. And I don’t know how I really came up with that. I think David is written like a first pass of the sheriff that initial dialogue with the sheriff and then I was going in writing the final pass and I was just trying to figure out something that kind of made him unique. And then the idea of having the coroner you know do the do his you know thing that that kind of came later. I mean I that was really figured out after the Reno. It’s like the whole thing didn’t come as an entire package. I did a read now and then I thought oh the coroner shouldn’t shouldn’t do Urbino he should do this other one. And what does and doesn’t the hotel manager do something as well it is the one arena he does just came up with those like out of whole cloth kind of thing. Well I did the arena in the in the who and I think when Jen did the hotel manager she did the Aboo.
Gary Winnick: [00:13:24] Is that right or did you think Dave. I think I remember asking you. So what’s his take. And you said OK and I think I had it. And then I think I did it later. OK. So you were the one that did that. I always hear you see they all three came from you.
Ron Gilbert: [00:13:41] All right. Jeff King wants to know. I’m curious where people got stuck when playing through the game. I recently finished it and a long time I was stuck It was when I didn’t know how to use the toxic toxic waste in the puddle. It took me a few days to get past that.
Gary Winnick: [00:13:58] That’s definitely one of the hardest. I think that the whole chain of him it’s more like people who say I don’t know where to charge the battery and faith that was really the problem. And I think part of the problem was they didn’t know that there was a puzzle to be solved because they had already found maybe possibly two ways to use the forest before that. You know just wandering through to get the simple berries. And also if they found the Easter egg with the navigator ahead they figured that was it. So they never even tried to solve it as a as a pencil to get through the puddle.
Ron Gilbert: [00:14:42] Yeah I think that I think that was one thing that I didn’t quite realize was that most people would have gotten in the forests with an alligator head. I kind of figured that would be more of more of a hidden easter egg and maybe it could be the difference in whether you are a monkey island fan or not like a.
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So we could get better results with better tools. Thanks for checking.
Let’s start a Kickstarter. 
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To save others from making the same effort:
I am trying this now. I was able to convert the mp3 to an mp4 video using a free movie-maker tool (Lightworks) - that took some time to figure out, but eventually I got it. I then uploaded to Youtube (with the ‘private’ setting). However, after all that, it seems Google doesn’t offer the auto-captioning option for this video. Some web research indicates I may need to wait a while for Google to process the audio for transcription, so I’ll check back later.
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It’s impressive. If you can do it, please add “Thimbleweed” in the dictionary
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Oh, my. That definitely works. Extremely expensive, though.
Actually, Google did finally complete the transcription and added autogenerated captions. The results are pretty impressive. See for yourself here:
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