High quality recordings and transcriptions of speech via remote platforms

Abstract

High quality recordings and transcriptions of speech are important to a wide variety of disciplines from linguistics and human language technology to biomedical screening, diagnosis and tracking. The wide availability of internet connections and powerful mobile devices offers low cost opportunities for collecting speech data at scale. But even in the era of open source software, numerous challenges remain. For example, video call applications such as Zoom have become widespread and allow for recording, but only provide lossy codecs with low frame rates, and often contain missing, repeated, or interpolated frames, as well as freezes, longer dropouts and other audio artefacts. LDC has recently developed a suite of tools to allow high quality internet-based audio recordings and transcription, with a premium on portability and flexibility, using secure cloud computing services for storage and back-end processing. We present here the current design and capabilities of our software, as well as availability in terms of open source code and app distribution. We also discuss future plans; planned capabilities include 2 + sided conversational recordings, connecting participants via the internet, a modern extension of Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS) collections.