Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Transcribe.cpp

workshop.cjpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 180 posts

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#101

Post by rmunn »

Looks very cool. One thing I have been looking for, which this doesn't seem to cover (at least I didn't see any mention of IPA in the model documentation), is a way to transcribe unknown languages phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell them (sound-based spelling rather than meaning-based spelling). I know several linguists doing research on minority languages (fewer than 10,000 speakers in some cases), which are small enough that they will never have enough effort made towards training language-specific models in that language.

Are there models I'm not aware of that are trained for this task? Taking audio in an unknown language, and rather than identifying the language, just transcribing the sounds to IPA? That would not be useful to most people, but it would be a Godsend to many, many linguists working with minority languages around the world.

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#102

Post by rolisz »

sipjca wrote: post #48
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #46

For anyone looking to build on top of this. I have tried a few different STT systems, and they accurately capture what I am saying. Unfortunately, they don't support the reasonable workflow I want to open an office document, for example, and start talking. And I want the software to continuously type what I am saying at the cursor with minimal latency. The continuous part is crucial. Many software will paste whatever…

You can fairly easily modify [Handy]( https://handy.computer ) to do this if you want I’m planning on having it as a first class feature of the app too just too many other issues to work on first

Can you give some pointers around this? I'd gladly help with a PR for this, but if you have anything docs/ideas around this it would be helpful.

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#103

Post by kelvinjps10 »

Is there something but for transcribing what you watch like videos and not your microphone? Samsung has this in my phone and it's useful for language learning. (Thought is not that accurate)

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#104

Post by shenberg »

rmunn wrote: post #101

Looks very cool. One thing I have been looking for, which this doesn't seem to cover (at least I didn't see any mention of IPA in the model documentation), is a way to transcribe unknown languages phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell them (sound-based spelling rather than meaning-based spelling). I know several linguists doing research on minority languages (fewer than 10,000 speakers in s…

We take a lot of shortcuts when speaking, it's actually much harder to transcribe phonemes than to transcribe words, even when aware of the language being spoken. Some models have been trained for the task (e.g. look at https://huggingface.co/spaces/KoelLabs/IPA-Transcription-EN ), but the error rate is really high.

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#105

Post by JesseHowell »

Really cool that every model is actually tested for accuracy instead of just claiming it works, I think alot of 'we support everything' tools skip that step. How are you checking accuracy for models that don't have an obvious "official" version to compare against?

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#106

Post by rmunn »

shenberg wrote: post #104
rmunn wrote: post #101

Looks very cool. One thing I have been looking for, which this doesn't seem to cover (at least I didn't see any mention of IPA in the model documentation), is a way to transcribe unknown languages phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell them (sound-based spelling rather than meaning-based spelling). I know several linguists doing research on minority languages (fewer than 10,000 speakers in s…

We take a lot of shortcuts when speaking, it's actually much harder to transcribe phonemes than to transcribe words, even when aware of the language being spoken. Some models have been trained for the task (e.g. look at https://huggingface.co/spaces/KoelLabs/IPA-Transcription-EN ), but the error rate is really high.

There are, broadly, two kinds of audio recordings that linguists want to transcribe. One is native speakers telling traditional stories, where they're speaking naturally and taking the natural shortcuts (such as "wanna" and "gonna" in English). The other is native speakers reading words (or short example sentences) very carefully and distinctly, so that the linguist can listen to the recording over and over to learn how to pronounce the word right. In those recording, they'll say "want to" and "going to" rather than "wanna" and "gonna".

Thanks for the pointer; I'll check out that model and see if it handles the "slowly and carefully" type of recording better than the "natural speaking" type. (And depending on what kinds of errors the model makes, even the recordings where it makes errors can prove useful: for example, a linguist studying regional variations in speech would want the model to produce the IPA for "gonna" rather than "going to").

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#107

Post by [deleted] »

nilslindemann wrote: post #54
mmmmbbbhb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know English doesn't work like that. The word you're saying only becomes clear with the surrounding context. Eg, 'there' vs 'their'.

It may be interesting to have it immediately insert the words, even if they are wrong, and when a sentence is finished, replace what has been written with the final corrected sentence.

[deleted]

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#108

Post by sipjca »

rmunn wrote: post #101

Looks very cool. One thing I have been looking for, which this doesn't seem to cover (at least I didn't see any mention of IPA in the model documentation), is a way to transcribe unknown languages phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell them (sound-based spelling rather than meaning-based spelling). I know several linguists doing research on minority languages (fewer than 10,000 speakers in s…

Largely this is out of scope for the library, mainly because I’m not aware of many models supporting this. but if there are models which support this would be happy to support

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#109

Post by sipjca »

JesseHowell wrote: post #105

Really cool that every model is actually tested for accuracy instead of just claiming it works, I think alot of 'we support everything' tools skip that step. How are you checking accuracy for models that don't have an obvious "official" version to compare against?

Every model with open weights has some code which can be used to inference it. So we download the published weights and run against inference library they suggest, be it transformers, Nemo, etc

Re: Transcribe.cpp

#110

Post by sipjca »

ctas wrote: post #98
sipjca wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m working on it, Linux is a big pain point especially Wayland Once things are more or less ironed out on MacOS and Windows a lot of attention will be turned towards Linux I know a lot of Linux PRs are open it just takes me so long to get around and test them. And often multiple different implementations trying to fix similar issues which is a lot of overhead sometimes

Really appreciate your work. Is there any way people can help? From your last sentence, it sounds like another PR isn't it and the opposite might be needed. But would love to contribute with testing if helpful. I'm regularly jumping between XFCE, KDE, GNOME, Niri, etc..

Testers by far as the most needed thing, I do maintain a list of per platform people who help to test so if you drop a GitHub username (or email me) I will add you to the list and ping for help

Basically the biggest blocker is me being the sole maintainer and reviewer at the moment and it just ends up taking a lot of time for the scale of the project. Which is why it moves slow and features typically are much slower than someone can vibe code. I know each added feature inevitably has bugs so I try to be careful with them.

But also Linux has historically been a minefield, fixing something for someone breaks for someone else so yeah testers really needed. Or anyone with deeper Linux DE knowledge than I have. I’m much more accustomed to server based Linux distros

Post reply on HN