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I'm looking for a speaker independent program (commercial or free) that would enable me to transcribe MP3 files containing speech recordings (especially podcasts) to text. I wanted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, but it seems like it only supports transcribing my own speech recordings. So what are the alternatives?

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  • Comment by Avi: I don't believe that's possible - speaker independent
    – Ivo Flipse
    Apr 6, 2010 at 11:06
  • what operating system?
    – studiohack
    Apr 6, 2010 at 18:42
  • Windows or Linux.
    – pako
    Oct 15, 2010 at 17:05
  • Solution: OpenAI's ASR Sep 23, 2022 at 2:24

6 Answers 6

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Dragon Naturally Speaking will import mp3 files and try to transcribe them. It prefers to tune its voice recognition to the individual speaker, but does a fair job without tuning. It would probably work best if your podcast speakers sound like Tom Brokaw.

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  • 2
    I tried Dragon Naturally Speaking, but it did a terrible job for podcasts with unknown speakers. It only worked fairly well with my own voice after training the program.
    – pako
    Oct 15, 2010 at 17:06
  • 1
    Can it also import other audio files and transcribe them? Oct 12, 2011 at 8:00
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One possible solution would be to upload your video to Youtube, and try the automatic captions that you can enable...it is not too accurate yet, but you can download the captions file and edit it yourself, if that helps...as for copyright/piracy issues for the song, you could make the video private on your profile, if that's even possible?

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    @studioback: Is this method by Youtube only applied to one's own video, not those uploaded by others?
    – Tim
    Jun 9, 2011 at 17:39
  • 1
    @Tim: it is for both, actually.
    – studiohack
    Jun 9, 2011 at 23:02
  • 1
    @studiohack: For those videos uploaded by others, how to do that? I mean, without downloading and uploading as my own videos?
    – Tim
    Jun 9, 2011 at 23:38
  • 1
    On most videos, there is a CC icon in the bottom, click it and then automatic transcription...
    – studiohack
    Jun 9, 2011 at 23:39
  • 3
    Related Question: How Use Google's YouTube Speech Recognition without uploading videos to YouTube? No answers yet; just asked it 10 minutes ago.
    – user287352
    Mar 29, 2014 at 0:21
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I would warn against trying Dragon Naturally Speaking--I wrote some scripts on my jailbroken iphone to copy/convert all the voicemail files from my phone to a folder on my PC and had the Dragon Naturally Speaking transcription service run against them.

The result of running the transcription against files with different speakers was absolutely unusable. I've tried some of the open source alternatives but speaker-independent voice recognition still seems limited to very small dictionaries.

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I'm using http://www.voicebase.com with podcast and videos on english and it works very well. It's free for 50 audio hours.

You can download audio transcription on rtf, srt or pdf.

You can download machine transcriptions about 10-15 minutes after you upload, and sometimes, early.

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Open Source: CMU Sphinx

Shareware: http://www.e-speaking.com/ (Windows)

Commercial: Dragon NaturallySpeaking (Windows)

You could also try this method if you were trying with osx which can be done using audacity and soundflower

You could also find some relevant links for opensource another shareware worth to try was voxcribecc

If you are an .net programmer you could use this method to make your own kit

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Podzinger would be a great solution, but I'm not sure that ramp (the new name for the company that used to be EveryZing, who produced Podzinger) offers the service for free anymore...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podzinger

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