Searching inside an audio file

Effects, Recipes, Interfacing with other software, etc.
Forum rules
If you require help using Audacity, please post on the forum board relevant to your operating system:
Windows
Mac OS X
GNU/Linux and Unix-like
Post Reply
ChrisSound
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:53 am
Operating System: Please select

Searching inside an audio file

Post by ChrisSound » Fri Mar 28, 2014 4:17 pm

Hi,

is there a way to search inside an audio file?
The goal would be to make a phonetic search (or even better a text search) inside an audio file. I often have interviews where I want to find again the location where we talked about a specific topic (finding when we talked about a specific topic inside an interview recording is a pain otherwise).

I was wondering if there is audio the possibility to do something similar as Evernote is doing with image search: the image is not translated into text, but for each element is assigned a text probability so that you can search it (cf. http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2013/07/1 ... ion-works/).

Regards, Chris

kozikowski
Forum Staff
Posts: 68941
Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:57 pm
Operating System: macOS 10.13 High Sierra

Re: Searching inside an audio file

Post by kozikowski » Fri Mar 28, 2014 4:39 pm

Audacity has no Speech to Text tools and no search tools beyond Silent Sense.
We do however have labels. You can strike a key combination and Audacity will put a visible label at that point in the recording. As long as you Save the Project in addition to Exporting a WAV at the end of the interview, the Project labels will be there for you. I think you can put text notes inside the label, as well.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/label_tracks.html

Koz

Trebor
Posts: 9852
Joined: Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:22 pm
Operating System: Windows 8 or 8.1

Re: Searching inside an audio file

Post by Trebor » Sat Mar 29, 2014 7:50 pm

I just noticed recently that YouTube will automatically generate captions for speech in video, for free , and you can download the transcript it has generated. It's surprisingly accurate, (in my case better than 95%), although I suppose its transcription accuracy will depend on ones accent :)

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/100076
Last edited by Trebor on Tue Apr 01, 2014 8:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ChrisSound
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:53 am
Operating System: Please select

Re: Searching inside an audio file

Post by ChrisSound » Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:13 pm

kozikowski wrote:Audacity has no Speech to Text tools and no search tools beyond Silent Sense.
Do you know if there is an existing software able to do that?
Trebor wrote:I just noticed recently that YouTube will automatically generate captions for speech in video, for free , and you can download the transcript it has generated.
I should look at this, that would be create, do you get the get the transcript as text or do you get it added inside a video?
Do you know if there is a Windows software doing this equivalent?

Trebor
Posts: 9852
Joined: Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:22 pm
Operating System: Windows 8 or 8.1

Re: Searching inside an audio file

Post by Trebor » Tue Apr 01, 2014 5:34 pm

ChrisSound wrote:Do you know if there is an existing software able to do that?
Microsoft Windows comes with speech-recognition ,
but it doesn't transcribe recordings, but "third party" software does ... http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 45c034abc5
ChrisSound wrote:
Trebor wrote:I just noticed recently that YouTube will automatically generate captions for speech in video, for free , and you can download the transcript it has generated.
I should look at this, that would be create, do you get the get the transcript as text or do you get it added inside a video?
The YouTube automatic captions are separate from the video, and can be downloaded ... http://youtu.be/kTvHIDKLFqc?t=2m12s

Post Reply