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Transcribed police scanners in real-time

murph.live

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Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#81

Post by runawaybottle »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53

The 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…

Well, when you come realize the training data for a lot of this is often someone reading the Washington Post corpus or something similar, it kind of makes sense why accuracy kind of sucks.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#82

Post by runawaybottle »

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…

I’d love to read a write up on this if you ever feel the urge.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#83

Post by edyc »

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…

Curious on why that is. Can you provide any insights on why it would generate hundreds of thousands a month?

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#84

Post by someguydave »

optimumsuave wrote: post #77

Developer of murph.live here again - after reading this thread I have some ideas I'd like to vet with everyone here. 1. We need to post links to the source of the stream. I neglected to do that for fear of cease and desist, but now I realize we need to create accountability on our own platform. I will be contacting broadcastify.com to ensure we can direct users to a source. 2. We need a disclaimer on the site directl…

I doubt that the google speech model was meant to deal with AMBE compressed voice. I think you will need to create your own speech-to-text model to solve the quality issues.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#85

Post by abhgh »

MengYuanLong wrote: post #57
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53

The 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.

Traditional Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems do this, and this component is known as a Language Model (LM).

Typically you would use/train a LM for your domain or specifically for your dataset.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#86

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ghostpepper wrote: post #58
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53

The 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…

It would be cool if there was a way to listen for a bit and feed some corrected transcriptions back in to help train the algorithm better

Yeah, live transcripting is one of those jobs that can be easily done remotely, at scale, and crowdsourced; if one sentence is transcripted by two or three people, you can do error correction / checking as well (or just show the different interpretations). Transcripts for radio comms are important because they can be used in legal proceedings. Same with e.g. bodycam footage.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#88

Post by belorn »

Automatic recording, transcribing and publish. A recipe to force them to change equipment and start using encryption.

I don't know the law in the US, but here in Sweden any police investgiation is kept under strict secrecy until completed. When a crime occur and journalist ask for details the answer is always the same. While investigation is ongoing no details may be given. That would not work if there is a searchable transcription of the communication online.

So an nice technical achievement, but the more successful it is the faster it will be made obsolete in terms of getting information out of police scanners.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#89

Post by n4r9 »

rasz wrote: post #72
MengYuanLong wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

apple dictation does this, it will change already transcribed text mid sentence if it thinks something else fits better https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322321 at 33 second mark https://twitter.com/jamescham/status/1265512829806927873

That's slightly different to what OP was talking about, if I'm understanding correctly. You're talking about reassessing the probability of previous words based on future words. They're talking about weighting the prior probability of each word based on the context i.e. police conversation as opposed to normal phone conversation.

Re: Transcribed police scanners in real-time

#90

Post by watwut »

MengYuanLong wrote: post #57
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53

The 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.

Imo, text to speech that produces apparent garbage is better then one who produces probably stuff that is wrong. Someone, either cop or citizen, could easily end up accused of wrongdoing where not actual wrongdoing happened.
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