Transcribe Dhamma Talks for free with Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications app by Google

Introduction

If you wish to transcribe a Dhamma talk (from speech to text), what are you going to do? And have you ever thought of how to help a deaf person to "listen" to a Dhamma talk (live)?

For the transcription task, there are many solutions now. Some are free, some are not.

For paid services, one can use industrial services offered by IBM, Amazon, or Google, and so many other AI powered ones. Some also have free or trial for such premium services, but with some limits (monthly audio length, paid features, etc...).

For free solutions, there are many ways to accomplish this task too. This post will introduce one simple, free and effective way to do it with an Android powered phone/device.

We are going to use the power of Google speech recognition for free through the app "Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications" (developed by Google).

The app should also be very helpful to the deaf people when trying to communicate with others.

If you find this app OK, pls also consider to introduce the app to the deaf people in your community.

They should also have the opportunity to "listen" to saddhamma too.

This app can recognise many languages well. The main drawback of it is that it needs an Internet connection to work.

How To

Disclaimer: If your audio is not a confidential material or privacy is not a big concern here (since the content of your audio will literally be "heard" by a third party AI powered program on a remote server or alike), this is method is good to go.

For Dhamma talks, normally there is no problem with these things.

Step 1: install "Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications" app
(by Google) from Android Google Play store. (You can open Google Play store app and search this app name or simply click on the links to open Google Play store directly. Then click on Install.)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.audio.hearing.visualization.accessibility.scribe

Step 2: open "Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications" app, go to its Setting > More settings

In "More settings", the most important setting is to switch on (enable) "Save Transcription".

You can also select primary and secondary language in this step.

Step 3: play a Dhamma talk file and let this app "listen" to it, the app will transcribe the talk (or live talk) into plain text.

The deaf people can read the transcription live in this step.

Remember your device must have an active Internet connection in order to work.

In theory, the app will send your audio chunks to remote servers to process them and receive the results in near real time.

I think the remote AI powered servers may also learn and collect something from your audio. Such data will be used to improve its services or advertisements or other purposes.

Step 4: when it is done, manually copy the transcibed text into your text editor for further checking and editing. We can do this because we did enable "Save Transcription" in the More settings menu above.