Very useful mapped version in NYC
https://scanmap.mobi/NY/
Transcribed police scanners in real-time
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#62Is 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)
Yes, it is legal in the US. Federal law allows it - P.R. 91-36 (FCC 93-410), though New York law attempts to make it illegal to do in your car: https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sec...
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#63When I was studying photojournalism on the side, for a while I ran a vintage radio scanner over the various local police/fire/etc. public simulcast frequencies. It didn't pay off with any "breaking news" leads, but one of the surprise benefits was the strong impression of professionalism and good nature by many.
I should be clear that I know there's tragic racism and other injustices everywhere, and that problems tend to be worse than is visible to most people, and I think now is the time to finally right some wrongs that we should've a long time ago. Perhaps relevant to that, it was really reassuring to observe signs of goodness in the institutions that many people never have occasion to. Problems need to be solved, but there's hope from multiple directions.
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#64The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. : Call was from a neighbor…
> I know up until injuries this was in France but when I press your boobs
> Jun 9, 2020 12:17 PM
Sounds like it's getting them very wrong.
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you look at the transcripts? They do not have very good accuracy. A better solution probably should do those things; this one I'm assuming is not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." Yes, I looked the website, and I also have my own website that does the same thing in a very similar manner. My comment was entirely in response to the suggestion Mac speech recognition be used for this. It should…
Assuming you tried Amazon Transcribe? How did it fare?
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#66The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. : Call was from a neighbor…
I don't have familiarity with speech-to-text but wouldn't it be possible to weight words based on their probability in this application to help resolve this. For example, suspect is probably a low frequency word in normal speech but very high in radio chatter.
This needs care. Imagine if you accidentally trained a model that added racism when none was present in the audio.
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#67The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. : Call was from a neighbor…
* For entertainment purposes only.
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#68The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. : Call was from a neighbor…
I don't have familiarity with speech-to-text but wouldn't it be possible to weight words based on their probability in this application to help resolve this. For example, suspect is probably a low frequency word in normal speech but very high in radio chatter.
[my side project is using speech-to-text so this is amateur hour response]
Yes, but it takes a bit to build up that weighted list and it can be quite hefty to parse. So they may be building this behind the scenes currently. As another commenter pointed out, being able to correct a chunk and send it back to help the algorithm would be a nice feature here.
Side note: I'm dealing with this issue at the moment - if anyone has a good resource on reducing the workload I'd love a link!.
Ed:spelling
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#69Hello Hacker News!!!
I am the developer of murph.live - I just want to thank all of you for taking the time to check it out and give us excellent feedback. I stumbled upon this post and now have goosebumps.
This started by listening to police scanners throughout the night during recent protests in Seattle, WA. I wanted to help and I immediately put my credit card down for Google's Speech to Text API.
As for the inbound streams, @blantonl is spot on - we use the streams from a premium account on broadcastify.com (thank you for not sending a cease and desist yet!).
A few dockerized ffmpeg processes segment the streamed audio into 30 second wav files. Subsequently, sox removes silence from the audio files as police scanners have quite a bit of downtime between transmissions. The performance is very scalable using docker containers to record and trim.
Currently, we pipe these trimmed wav files to the Google Speech API - as others have mentioned this is $$$. We are receiving donations, but this dependency on Google will eventually need to be eliminated.
I have started looking into possible solutions using NLP and other acoustic models to bring the costs down. Honestly, speech processing is not my forte so I'm kind of shooting in the dark here. I am currently testing pre-trained models for wav2letter++, kaldi, vosk, and maybe deepspeech.
We can all agree the quality of the transcripts is something to be desired and improved upon. Potentially dangerous if transcribed incorrectly, but nonetheless we wanted to launch to give citizens a platform to provide transparency into our government. The idea is what counts right now.
Thanks again and I will be responding to a bunch of comments on here! You all rock!
Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time
#70This is very impressive. I'm the owner of Broadcastify.com, where presumably these streams are being transcribed from. We've dabbled in this space and looked at real-world approaches to taking something like this to market, but transcribing 7000+ streams to text seems like an expensive (computational) and ($$) effort that needs a lot of investigation. Note to mention that the individual lexicons between streams are d…
Thank you for the kind words. My team and I simply want to help people and create accountability/transparency.
We decided to ask for forgiveness on this project - we do in fact have a premium account with you guys! ffmpeg records and segments your streams, sox removes silence from scanners, Google transcribes, redis serves it all up quickly!
A broadcastify.com premium account is not not a great excuse, but I would love to have a conversation at length with you and your team! How do we get in contact? Thanks again!