Comments on: Kicking the tires on Adobe CS4 speech transcription

By: Jonathan Stray » Lifelogging + Machine Transcription = Public Reporters’ Notebooks

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:46:01 +0000

[...] But transcribing recordings is a huge time-sucking pain in the ass, and AV isn’t searchable so there’s no quick way for either the reporter or the audience to find that favorite quote. Enter machine transcription, automated speech-to-text systems that produce a transcript of any conversation. This sort of technology is still in its infancy, and it has accuracy problems — but it’s already used by Google Voice to convert voicemail to email, by YouTube to make videos of political speeches searchable, and in Adobe Premiere for semi-automated tape logging. [...]

By: J Fairweather

J Fairweather — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:51:04 +0000

It took 2:35 to transcribe a 44:12 piece. For whatever reason, Encoder appeared behind the Premiere window, which was confusing as nothing appeared to be happening, but this was a minor issue. If you have (as I do) eight hours of interviews, the thought of running a 28 hour batch doesn’t translate (excuse the pun) into a timely workflow. This was a studio shoot with subjects from all over the country, including NY, TX, Chicago, and latin accents. The quality varied, but I don’t think this feature is ready for prime time.
For my money and my needs, it would be faster to drop in markers on the fly and get on with the editing.

By: David McW

David McW — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:58:52 +0000

It worked reasonably well with a quicktime MOV file but cannot get it work with an MXF file….the transcribe button is greyed out when presented with an MXF file….any thoughts anyone? Thanks

By: CS4 – Questions, Doubts, Impressions and Confessions of an FCP Cutter « adam schreck

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:48:06 +0000

[...] particular interest to me was the “speech transcription” feature. Dave pulled up a clip and using this function, Premiere created a searchable transcription of the [...]

By: randall martin

randall martin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:21:30 +0000

My results from a recorded voice over were just as bad…and for me it is worthless….had similar issues with Dragon Naturally Speaking which I thought I could use instead of manually transcribing interviews. Not so…I can type faster!!!!

By: Mark Gillespie

Mark Gillespie — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:35:32 +0000

I think this might be just what I’ve been looking for…I produce a weekly podcast, and never bothered to transcribe all of the episodes so that I could make PDF transcripts available on the website. I was looking for a reason to upgrade anyway…

By: Fred Blatz

Fred Blatz — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:18:30 +0000

I’ve tested the transcription feature in Soundbooth. It isn’t perfect but my results were far superior than those of the test clip above. I think the engine noise undermined the accuracy of the transcription. Although even with pristine audio you’ll need to listen to clip and correct the transcript. But I found it was pretty accurate.

The other cool feature is that it weds the text to the time code location in the clip. Very useful if you have long interviews and you’re trying to figure out where something was said. As a documentary filmmaker the feature is a must have. It will save you thousands of $$ in transcription fees.

By: A look at Adobe CS4 speech transcription at FreshDV

A look at Adobe CS4 speech transcription at FreshDV — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:01:07 +0000

[...] Adobe Creative Suite 4 includes a speech transcription feature, available in both Premiere Pro CS4 and Soundbooth CS4. Scott Simmons kicked the tires on it recently, here’s what he found. [...]

By: Dylan Reeve

Dylan Reeve — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:00:07 +0000

I’ve been dubious about this since I heard about it the first time. I’ve seen an used quite a few speech-to-text apps, and the only time I’ve seen anything close to accurate results has been when app was trained for the voice, the sound was clear and without confusing background noise, and the speaker was mindful of the process and avoided running words together. Basically pretty much everything 90% of our video isn’t.

I don’t know what technology exists, but it’s hard to imagine it ever getting a whole lot better for the average clip.

By: DMarcus

DMarcus — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:47:59 +0000

I at least have to give props to Adobe for making an attempt to tackle a process that most of us doc editors and producers have to deal with on a constant basis. A few years back I even tried to use a speech recognition software to help transcribe hours of footage. The results were just as comical as Scott’s. So to me, to have an assistant take the time to go through and correct perhaps 50-70% of a transcription…I rather just get it done correctly the first time. This kind of technology unfortunately takes hours upon of hours of voice training to truly get it done right.

Now I wish Apple would get off their butts and make some real feature improvements to FCP…I mean make an effort guys! It’s been like 4 years.