“Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.”
— Charlie Chaplin, from The Great Dictator.
I wrote a program this morning. I called it Dictator. Which then triggered in my mind The Great Dictator and I changed the name to Chaplin. Sounds much more software-esque doesn’t it?
What is Chaplin? Well it’s the offspring of me wanting an easier way to do these blogs. It’s an offline speech-to-text writer. Offline so my data doesn’t fly who knows where, and it’s free. But the good thing is, I can actually correct my accent in it!!
I’ve got a Geordie accent. (I don’t think it’s that strong these days, but others may argue with that). Often polled as being a nice, friendly accent it’s nonetheless an absolute pain for speech recognition. Even my Sky box doesn’t understand me.
SO how does it learn? Well, technically it doesn’t. I have to let it misunderstand me first, then I have a correction list that it uses to replace what it thinks it heard. This is great when I’m talking about my projects because ProbeSmith isn’t even in an AI dictionary – but when Chaplin thinks I said something like “prop smith” it is able to correct it without me having to go through doing find and replace.
I can also import audio files, so if I’m in the workshop and want to transcribe something I just record it on my phone then upload it later.
And does it work? Well, the last post I did (CNC/PCB/WTF?) was entirely dictated, so I guess it’ll be seeing some pretty hefty work in the future!
The eagle eyed of you may have noticed this has an error in it – ping fail (PNG File) wasn’t corrected at the time I took this screenshot. I added it to the corrections list before re-running the Apply Corrections for the final post.