A simple SFSpeechRecognizer-based Voice Recording transcriber for macOS.
If you have voice recordings (dictations) that you would like to transcribe using your macOS computer, you can use this application to do so.
The voice-recordings must be in mp3, m4a, wav, or mpa-format (mor formats
may be possible, haven't tested yet).
Katip will require local transcription capabilities; it does not use Apple's servers, otherwise the transcription would be limited to a few seconds.
Depending on the performance of your local macOS computer, the transcription may happen in somewhere between realtime and 3-4x real-time speed. Please be patient.
You may ask what Katip means and why I called it that way and why there is a fez as application icon.
The wise Wikipedia has the answer:
Uska Dara (A Turkish Tale) is a 1953 song made famous by Eartha Kitt,
... which is, actually wrong. The original title is "Üsküdar'a giderken", meaning while on my way to Üsküdar, where Üsküdar is district of Istanbul and in those days it was probably a suburb of Istanbul...
also recorded by Eydie Gormé. It is based on the Turkish folk song Kâtibim about a woman and her secretary traveling to Üsküdar. On early American recordings, this adaptation is credited to Stella Lee.
Basically, Kâtibim means "my Katip" and "Katip" is a male secretary.
In olden days in Turkey, many people could not or would not want to write themselves and thus there were Katip who would write for other people. Sometimes you had your own Katip (provided you were rich enough to pay for a full-time Katip).
That's the background of the title: Katip = your (male) secretary
I recommend to listen to the Eartha Kitt version of the song on YouTube.
You need to tell macOS which languages you want to have offline transcription support. In this case, macOS will download a speech-data for your language and then you can perform your transcript. You have to do this for every language you want to use.
To do so, follow the guidelines:
IMPORTANT: PLEASE SWITCH ON "Enable Voice Control", otherwise the transcription will not work.
macOS will then download the language packs required. Please make sure those language packs are downloaded.
Note: English (US) currently has some issues because Apple allows that one to only work on their servers.
If you have any requests, please do not hesitate to open an issue.
SFSpeechRecognizer can't estimate how long the transcription will take. The user,
though, would like to know how long it may take. The solution I have come up is
actually easy:
It seems, the time it takes is dependent on machine and load on the machine. The load itself doesn't some to influence too much. So, the first time you run the software on a machine in your account, it will show an indeterminate progress bar. It will tell you that it might take as much as the duration of your audio recording.
At the end of each recording, it will check how long it actually took. And starting with the second transcription, it will have better and better estimates and will display a determinate progress bar.
If you think the timing sucks, you can reset all assumptions in the preferences.
There might be more documentation on Blog Post.
Copyright 2021 Imdat Solak
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