Speech Training Recorder

Simple GUI application to help record audio dictated from given text prompts, for use with training speech recognition or speech synthesis.

Given a text file containing prompts, this app will choose a random selection and ordering of them, display them to be dictated by the user, and record the dictation audio and metadata to a .wav file and recorder.tsv file respectively. You can select a previous recording to play it back, delete it, and/or re-record it.

Requirements

Python 3
See requirements.txt for specific packages
Cross platform: Linux, MacOS, Windows (not-tested)

Developer/Tester Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training-recorder.git
cd speech-training-recorder
mkdir ./audio_data
CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib" pip install -r requirements.txt

python3 recorder.py -p prompts/timit.txt                          # minimum command-line to start
python3 recorder.py -p prompts/timit.txt -d ~/Desktop/audio-data  # audio file on Desktop (MacOS)

Caveats and Context

Since pyAudio has portAudio as a dependency, one must first install portaudio. The easiest way is with

brew install portaudio

however if the portaudio library is installed in a custom location (manually or via macports) then to specify the location of headers and libraries, this is why we use CPPFLAGS & LDFLAGS above with pip.

More generally, pip needs to know where to look, e.g. in /opt/local/* to build an external dependency. A standalone pip command to accomplish this with --global-option:

pip install --global-option='build_ext' --global-option='-I/opt/local/include' --global-option='-L/opt/local/lib' pyaudio

Usage

usage: recorder.py [-h] [-p PROMPTS_FILENAME] [-d SAVE_DIR] [-c PROMPTS_COUNT]
                   [-l PROMPT_LEN_SOFT_MAX] [-o]

Given a text file containing prompts, this app will choose a random selection
and ordering of them, display them to be dictated by the user, and record the
dictation audio and metadata to a `.wav` file and `recorder.tsv` file
respectively.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PROMPTS_FILENAME, --prompts_filename PROMPTS_FILENAME
                        file containing prompts to choose from
  -d SAVE_DIR, --save_dir SAVE_DIR
                        where to save .wav & recorder.tsv files (default:
                        ../audio_data)
  -c PROMPTS_COUNT, --prompts_count PROMPTS_COUNT
                        number of prompts to select and display (default: 100)
  -l PROMPT_LEN_SOFT_MAX, --prompt_len_soft_max PROMPT_LEN_SOFT_MAX
  -o, --ordered         present prompts in order, as opposed to random
                        (default: False)

Customization

See prompts/ directory for acceptable formats for prompt files: the simplest is rainbow_passage.txt.

Related Repositories

daanzu/kaldi_ag_training: Docker image and scripts for training finetuned or completely personal Kaldi speech models. Particularly for use with kaldi-active-grammar.

ruohoruotsi / speech-training-recorder