This section of the K-OAr Center’s site is a porting of some content from the Speech Data & Tech website, formerly at https://speechandtech.eu/ (you can find its latest Internet Archive copy here).
Welcome to Speech Data & Tech
The initiators of the website are a group of experts interested in speech data with very different backgrounds – oral history, computational linguistics, anthropology, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology. We all have an interest in exploring how technology can be integrated into research that involves spoken narratives.
This may vary from very basic technologies, such as the conversion of recorded speech from analogue to digital, or more elaborate ones, such as ASR applied to automatically generate transcripts of the spoken content.
We first offer basic information about the epistemological focus of research domains that deal with speech data. This is followed by an explanation of relevant technologies and related tools that researchers can use. We then share our knowledge in the sections Workshops, showcases and publications.
Last but not least, you can access the first concrete result of our efforts: The Transcription Portal, an open source service for automatic transcription in English, German, Dutch and Italian.
What drives us?
We could use text to describe what drives us, but as scholars interested in the multilayered nature of speech and of non-verbal communication, we prefer to present three short video-talks by key-members of our group in which they explain why they are members of this network. Listen to what speech technologist Henk van de Heuvel, sociolinguistic Silvia Calamai, and data curator and former member of our group Louise Corti have to say in their own mother tongue.
Their talks offered us the opportunity to apply some of the tools of which we would like to increase the uptake amongst scholars. See below the video-clips for an explanation.
We have applied Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe the spoken content of the video’s and automatic translation of Google translate to translate it into two other languages. If you want to manage the transcripts click on the closed caption button.
In the video of speech technologist Henk van de Heuvel, ASR software for Dutch has been applied, developed at the university of Twente and the Radboud University of Nijmegen, to high-quality audio (quiet environment, microphone of good quality) and automatic translation from Dutch to Italian and English with Google Translate. The subtitles were added with the tool SubtitleEdit.
In the video of sociolinguist Silvia Calamai, ASR software for Italian has been applied, developed by Piero Cosi at the University of Padova, to a high quality audio (quiet environment, microphone of good quality), and automatic translation from Italian to Dutch and English with Google Translate.
In the video of data specialist Louise Corti, ASR software for English has been applied developed at the University of Sheffield, to a high quality audio (quiet environment, microphone of good quality), and automatic translation from English to Dutch and Italian with Google Translate.
Who we are
The group of people working on this website since sept – 2016, consists of: