The Catalan and French students Marc Assens and André Bastié, from the Dublin City University have found an answer to the frequent ‘transcript drama’ of researchers and journalists.

The Project was created while Assens was transcribing twelve interviews for a university work during his master studies at the Dublin City University. With the will of making easier this tedious labor, Assens worked with his roommate, Bastié, an Erasmus student in telecommunications engineering specialised in artificial intelligence. Then, both united their knowledge and created Happy Scribe, the new software to transform audio into text.

Happy Scribe can do in few minutes a work that would conventionally last several hours, and this software is available in 80 different languages and dialects.

Firstly, Assens and Bastié offered their work for free through a website, but when the Project was shown in the American publication Poynter, the big number of request saturated the website. In that point, they decided to price low the service to finance the maintenance of a more powerful Server. The actual server can cover the demand of more than thousand users without collapsing. The price is 0, 09€ per minute of transcription, converting a 30 minutes audio costs less than 3€.

When the audio is introduced, they sent the transcription by mail to the user, and the application includes an editor to retouch the parts that have not been correctly transcribed. The platform works with ‘machine learning’, which learn continuously while more transcriptions are being introduced in the system.

The creators confirm that the functioning will be improved in the next months. Meanwhile, lots of researchers, students and professionals can enjoy right now the many advantages of this new Project.

Source: http://emprenem.ara.cat/petites-mitjanes/Dos-estudiants-letern-transcriure-audios_0_1862813727.html