Transcribed police scanners in real-time

Post by JKCalhoun » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

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…

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

lunixbochs wrote: post #21

godzillabrennus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could conceivably do this using the text to speech recognition on a Mac using Loopback to capture the stream to a microphone input. https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ Someone clever enough could create containers to run the software locally and have many loops running off many streams to many instances of the audio to text feature.

Conventional speech recognition will not have very good accuracy for this sort of task out of the box. You will basically need to do local (as in, based on map location) language modeling, and should probably do custom acoustic modeling as well (training a neural network on what radio speech sounds like).

Post by ketzo » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #31

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 obl…

Post by petee » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 1:06 AM UTC

Post by bertmuthalaly » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

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…