VoxForge
VoxForge
email from Sam:
--- (Edited on 11/16/2009 1:48 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---
My reply:
Hi Sam,
Thanks for the feedback, my replies follow:
1. We could hold a fundraising / grant drive where we seek to raise five thousand dollars, and then use that money to pay people to give a half hour of speaking time in exchange for five dollars, giving a total of about five hundred hours in addition to the sixty we already have or
2. We could collaborate with Canonical LTD to advertise voxforge speech submission, and then get them to package the full speech recognition suite
3. Question: are five hundred hours enough to begin the process of having the speech recognition automatically segment audio books, as was suggested? Or is that process even feasible?
4. Is there a wide disparity in the amount of male to female dictation?
--- (Edited on 11/16/2009 1:49 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---
Hey Ken:
Do you have contacts at Canonical?
In
a roundabout way, yes. I'm friends with a forum moderator / package
maintainer and I spoke with him on the phone for a bit -- he suggested
that I could sticky a thread on the Ubuntu forums that would advertise
Voxforge speech recognition. I won't lie and misrepresent how much
clout he has: he has forum power, but not a whole lot else. However,
the forum has a ton of motivated people that would probably help us out
if they knew about the project. In this sense I *can* get voxforge
advertised. Speech recognition is a long term goal for the Ubuntu
project, and it feels like there hasn't been enough inter-project
communication to really get the ball rolling on this.
The
donations thread feels like it died in a kind of inconclusive state. I
didn't even know about the Mechanical Turk possibility; what would be
nice is if we only had to pay out to people upon verifying their
uploaded data to be good and usable. If we had people rely on the audio
java thingy solely, that would be ideal for mechanical turk. This can
be talked about more thoroughly in the forum, though.
I've
already segmented an hour long audio book (spoken by a woman), but for
some reason the script for finding out-of-lexicon words doesn't work
for me. I was hoping that by doing the grunt work of matching up text
to spoken audio I would leave the other stuff for people more
knowledgeable than I.
--- (Edited on 11/16/2009 1:50 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---
Hi Sam,
If you want to contact your forum moderator friend to
give VoxForge more exposure, then please do... Any help is greatly
appreciated!
thanks,
Ken
--- (Edited on 11/16/2009 1:50 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---