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Transcribed police scanners in real-time

murph.live

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Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#31

Post by blantonl »

atarian wrote: post #24

Apart from the police and people listening out of interest/curiosity, who else taps into police scanners? It seems like a really narrow and competitive niche to be in for developers.

It is ridiculously competitive in the mobile app store market, because there is a lot of revenue out there. All of the apps source their streams from Broadcastify, and they license Broadcastify's API and content to do so. The apps are enormously popular, and the market generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue.

I deal constantly with nefarious developers who often feel like Broadcastify has an obligation to grant them a license. We had a terrible dust up this weekend with a developer that was upset we wouldn't grant him a license to develop "yet another police scanner app" and he went on a warpath with me personally.

The app store environment is a major pain and exhausting...

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#32

Post by jauer »

mhh__ wrote: post #28

Is it legal to listen to these in the states? I know OFCOM (UK FCC) state it's illegal to listen to certain frequencies without permission, which seems delightfully unenforceable (for legal reasons I most definitely do not possess a wideband software defined radio or a similarly sensitive antenna)

(not a lawyer, if one shows up, listen to them) Generally speaking, you can listen to anything, as long as it's not for commercial gain. The exception to this is mobile phones, because it was trivial to listen to them using children's toy radios.

There's apparently some uncertainty around handling of encrypted emergency services communications: https://www.rtdna.org/content/scanners

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#33

Post by tobych »

atarian wrote: post #24

Apart from the police and people listening out of interest/curiosity, who else taps into police scanners? It seems like a really narrow and competitive niche to be in for developers.

A CNN reporter mentioned he was "listening to the police scanner in one ear" the other day while he was reporting live on a protest.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#34

Post by jcims »

lunixbochs wrote: post #12
blantonl wrote: post #6

This is very impressive. I'm the owner of Broadcastify.com, where presumably these streams are being transcribed from. We've dabbled in this space and looked at real-world approaches to taking something like this to market, but transcribing 7000+ streams to text seems like an expensive (computational) and ($$) effort that needs a lot of investigation. Note to mention that the individual lexicons between streams are d…

I prototyped this concept too, at https://feeds.talonvoice.com with prohibitively expensive Google speech recognition, but also have a feature for users to listen and fix transcriptions. If murph was anything like me they probably paid for broadcastify and tailed a couple of the static mp3 feeds. My plan was to collect user transcription corrections on my site then train my own inexpensive models on them. The open-so…

Not to be 'that guy' but I vastly prefer your implementation. Having both the audio and transcription is almost mandatory to something like this (unless I'm an idiot and missing the ability to play the call on this).

I wonder if one could mix in openstreetmap data for a location to help pick up local references. (Eventually would be cool to round trip it with a little ping when addresses/businesses are referenced).

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#35

Post by jcims »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #8

Example audio: https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351 This is close enough to the Seattle feed that you can do a compare & contrast. Heard: "clear my first call ocean nora 470" On the site: "charlie my first call" So, yeah, this still has a long long way to go. I considered and discarded this in 2011 because it was pure insanity, and as another comment suggests, it's highly context-sensitive. "ECR" is El Camino…

Your scanner project was a marvel to me at the time.

Until a system can train right down to the officer/dispatcher I don't see how this gets beyond 50-60% accurate. I can't even transcribe half the calls, not sure why I should expect a computer to (at this time anyway).

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#36

Post by jcims »

blantonl wrote: post #17
lunixbochs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prototyped this concept too, at https://feeds.talonvoice.com with prohibitively expensive Google speech recognition, but also have a feature for users to listen and fix transcriptions. If murph was anything like me they probably paid for broadcastify and tailed a couple of the static mp3 feeds. My plan was to collect user transcription corrections on my site then train my own inexpensive models on them. The open-so…

Our new project, Broadcastify Calls, might be a better fit for this. Instead of 24x7 live streams, we capture and ingest every individual call as a compressed audio file from SDRs (software defined receivers) We can then ingest and present back to consumers playback, rewind, playlist, of those calls. We're now capturing over 100 systems and 800-900 calls a minute... as we solidify the architecture it will be our new…

Love the idea! P25 decoder seems like it needs a little tuning...can you share what you're using?

Any thoughts on adding the ability to comment/transcribe/etc?

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#37

Post by yellow_postit »

Neat! Wonder what service they are using for the transcription as some of the results are pretty rough probably from both poor quality audio and a unique lexicon. Custom speech models could probably go a long way here to clean it up and I would bet there’s some public interest in contributing transcriptions for training if the site allowed user submitted corrections. Having this indexed and searchable could be powerful.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#40

Post by ciarannolan »

blantonl wrote: post #6

This is very impressive. I'm the owner of Broadcastify.com, where presumably these streams are being transcribed from. We've dabbled in this space and looked at real-world approaches to taking something like this to market, but transcribing 7000+ streams to text seems like an expensive (computational) and ($$) effort that needs a lot of investigation. Note to mention that the individual lexicons between streams are d…

Not exactly related to this specific post, but do you worry about the slow transition to encrypted comms that emergency departments are making?
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