SpeechLoop VS praat

I created a toolkit to evaluate many different speech recognition engines.

https://github.com/robmsmt/SpeechLoop

Comparing speech systems can take a long time esp for a dev who doesn't have the background in audio/ml. How do you know which one will work best? Will new shiny transformer model perform well enough? Most end up using one of the big tech companies existing API to throw their data at. Whilst this is convenient, I think that it's a travesty that opensource speech systems have not are not as easy to use. I was hoping to change that to make it easy to evaluate and compare them!

Checkout: https://github.com/robmsmt/SpeechLoop looking for feedback on:

I made this to make it easy[ish]).... check: https://github.com/robmsmt/SpeechLoop

This brings back memories.

I worked my way through some of its source code many years ago during my post-graduate studies and it was very _strange_. I see it is now on GitHub [0].

They used C macros to implement object oriented programming, with symbols like `me` and `my` and `thee` scattered throughout the source code. It seems the code has been converted to C++ (IIRC it used to be in C), but I still see the `my` keyword in there.

They have their own BASIC-like scripting language. The weirdest property for me was that it allowed for whitespace in the identifiers. Just look at the example in [1]: The `Create simple Matrix` is actually a function in the scripting language that constructs a matrix object. The function name corresponds to a menu item and IIRC they used some more preprocessor magic to reuse the same code for the menus on the GUI and the functions in the scripting language.

I don't think you're supposed to write the scripts by hand. Rather it recorded your actions as you worked your way through the GUI and then you could export and modify those recordings as scripts.

They also implemented their own cross platform GUI toolkit rather than using one of the existing cross-platform GUI toolkits, so it works on Windows, Linux (or any X Windows I believe) and MacOS.

[0]: https://github.com/praat/praat

IPA is great, but even it fails to perfectly transcribe the subtleties of sound. Everyone has their own unique auditory space — your schwa is not the same as mine. Think about the range of sounds that could reasonably transcribed as a certain vowel or consonant, you can use a tool like Praat (https://github.com/praat/praat) to visualise it.

I wrote a script that worked beautifully on all of my test files (yay!). When I went to run it on all 240 real files, it kicked up this error on file 6. I am measuring VOT by having two point tiers - one marking the burst and one marking the onset of voicing. The script is just doing simple subtraction. I thought, maybe this is a negative VOT and Praat doesn't like that for some reason, but I checked and that is not the case. When I Google the error, I just get a script written by Paul Boersma that has this line in it, but I am not sure what it is doing there (https://github.com/praat/praat/blob/master/fon/praat_TextGrid_init.cpp).

From here