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Comment by craigcannon | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN!

Craig from YC here. Ramon Recuero and I built SpeechBoard.

Here's how it works: you record a podcast and upload it to SpeechBoard. We run it through a few speech to text APIs to generate a transcription for you. From there you can delete words from the transcript and we cut them from the audio.

Then you can download three files: your edited audio, your original file with cuts marked in metadata for importing to Audition/Audacity, and labels for importing into Audacity.

Nailing the in/out points of words was the hardest part, which led us to create the Audition/Audacity import feature and now I think that's the best part :)

Let us know what you think!

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This is great! You've nailed one of the major pain-points in creating and producing high quality podcasts/audiobooks.

The other major pain-point that I've identified after spending 10 years in the podcast and audiobook industries is audio mastering. As a mastering engineer, I know how troublesome it can be to master audio so that it is at a competitive dynamic range.

Would you be interested in implementing an "auto-master" feature that I've developed? If so, please reach out! My email is in my HN profile.

I think you can pass the output audio file through https://auphonic.com/ and that will get the job done for you.

Really nice + fun.

One suggestion is to be able to add extra silence (whitenoise?) so we can retain a natural flow after cutting aggressively.

Maybe recognize an ellipses ... and add a second or two?

Smart! Keywords could be really handy. [Add Intro Music] and that sort of thing.

This is pretty great, I will see if we can use it for our conference calls as well. Could you share some of the technical details behind the project?

Nice! Yeah, we've run into a few interesting use cases already e.g. sermons, which I didn't even know were recorded.

So it's written in Python and the main API we rely on is IBM's Speech to Text.

One thing that became an issue was deleting half of a word or inserting characters. Now we handle that with JavaScript. In the future we'd like to get some Lyrebird in there :)

If you have specific questions just lmk.

Impressed that you’re going to incorporate Lyrebird!

Just trying to automate myself out of a job :)

Do you have a privacy policy?

Are you storing the audio and/or edited transcripts?

We're not storing anything.

But we don't have a formal policy. We'll work on that.

Thanks! It's likely obvious to users with a technical background, but others might not realize that the STT APIs used by this service could retain uploaded audio data.

Very cool! I did find that if I remove "three" there's a noticeable jump in the resulting audio. But it's great that I can take the output and further refine it.

Thanks! Yeah, the word in/out points still aren't perfect so the imports really help there.

Hey Craig, how do you transcribed the audio in your app? and presumably, it only supports English (atm)?

Hey!

We do it with a few speech to text APIs.

We've only tested with English so far but it should be able to handle a bunch: Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin.

So not just one provider?

Is encoding time the only thing from preventing this from extending to video?

Encoding time + file size for uploads.

It's definitely something we're interested in though.

Check out ScriptSync too - http://www.avid.com/products/media-composer-scriptsync-optio...

I also talked about this project in depth on Spencer Wright's podcast - https://theprepared.org/podcast-feed/2017/10/15/craig-cannon...

Listen to Sam Harris's latest podcast. Before he starts the show, he basically explains the problem you are solving. I think he would be interested!

Will check it out!

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