Voice recorders and transcription software.

[samran]

Hello,

I'm headed to a conference next month and for a variety of reasons I'm looking to record the entire conference proceedings (2 full days of presentations).

I'm wondering if anyone out there can make a recommendation of potential voice recorders that might be useful for this type of job and how much memory would be needed for say 15 hours of voice recordings.

On top of that, are there any good transcription software which could change all this into written format.

Thanks in advance.

[bangkockney]

I don't think the transcription part would be possible to a decent level.

Won't the slide decks be made available to you?

[Arkady]

At the top end there is this sort of thing http://www.amazon.com/Olympus-LS-14-Linear-PCM-Recorder/dp/B009QZH5GM/ref=dp_ob_title_ce . I have the LS-11 which is good enough for recording music but not necessary for recording only voice. I think mine can can record about 16 hours of MP3 on the onboard memory and you can add in flash memory too. Olympus also has a range of lower end voice recorders that are probably quite adequate. There are other brands like Zoom, Tascam and Sony that are also good.

[samran]

Cheers for that Arkady

I don't think the transcription part would be possible to a decent level.

Won't the slide decks be made available to you?

unfortunately these days most people put together pretty crap PP decks and you are none the wiser for reading them. Sitting in the conference is partly research for me, so having a transcrip of what is said will be quite useful.

[simple1]

Samran: have you already researched the main speach recognition vendors? An example below. I suggest the main issue will be accuracy and the requirement for manual corrections as most voice to text software tools require being "taught" by the user due to voice tone and background noise variations.

http://voice-recognition-software-review.toptenreviews.com/voice-recognition-software-dictation-test.html

EDIT: How about contacting the Trade Attache at your Embassy to see if they can point you towards someone who you could contract for say a week to document the voice presentations

Edited September 10, 2013 by simple1

[bangkockney]

Cheers for that Arkady

I don't think the transcription part would be possible to a decent level.

Won't the slide decks be made available to you?

unfortunately these days most people put together pretty crap PP decks and you are none the wiser for reading them. Sitting in the conference is partly research for me, so having a transcrip of what is said will be quite useful.

I know what you mean, it can be quite hit and miss. Will the conference be video recorded?

Re the transcript, you're best bet will probably be a hack: that is to train a system using your voice and repeat word-for-word your recordings.

Or transcribe yourself manually.

If it were me, I'd outsource to a transcription service as there's far too much work involved.

[bangkockney]

Or if you don't need full notes, you could type whilst at the conference, using your recordings as a backup for bits you'll do later. You could even type timestamps to reference when back home.

Sorry to say, there isn't yet a magic bullet in this field. Speach-to-text on the scale you want with no labeled data is not currently possible - it's a very difficult task.

[samran]

Cheers for that Arkady

I don't think the transcription part would be possible to a decent level.

Won't the slide decks be made available to you?

unfortunately these days most people put together pretty crap PP decks and you are none the wiser for reading them. Sitting in the conference is partly research for me, so having a transcrip of what is said will be quite useful.

I know what you mean, it can be quite hit and miss. Will the conference be video recorded?

Re the transcript, you're best bet will probably be a hack: that is to train a system using your voice and repeat word-for-word your recordings.

Or transcribe yourself manually.

If it were me, I'd outsource to a transcription service as there's far too much work involved.

suspect that is what I'm going to have to do, but was hoping there was a technological solution to this. Now, just need to find someone who can transcribe all this stuff for me. It seems to be an expensive business.

[harrry]

Dragon dictate. THey have a package where they sell it with an apropriate recorder. you can use any similar quality ones. You will need to train your software and preferably use the package from the regeon you are recording...ie UK for english speakers....The US for Amerian pronunciation and Australian for people who speak properly.

[ETatBKK]

I know what you mean, it can be quite hit and miss. Will the conference be video recorded?

Re the transcript, you're best bet will probably be a hack: that is to train a system using your voice and repeat word-for-word your recordings.

Or transcribe yourself manually.

If it were me, I'd outsource to a transcription service as there's far too much work involved.

I do the same - outsourced the transcript to U students in the same field of knowledge. I also tried professional translation service here, yet they could not able to capture the technical discussion in full.

did experiment few speech-to-text applications, the effort of 'training' and adjusting the system to multiple speakers, is longer than typing in manually.