The initiators of this website are a group of experts interested in speech data with very different backgrounds - oral history, computational linguistics, anthropology, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology. We all have an interest in exploring how technology can be integrated into research that involves spoken narratives. 

This may vary from very basic technologies, such as the conversion of recorded speech from analogue to digital, or more elaborate ones, such as ASR applied to automatically generate transcripts of the spoken content. 

We first offer basic information about the epistemological focus of research domains that deal with speech data. This is followed by an explanation of relevant technologies and related tools that researchers can use. We then share our knowledge in the sections Workshops, showcases and publications.

Last but not least, you can access the first concrete result of our efforts: The Transcription Portal, an open source service for automatic transcription in English, German, Dutch and Italian.

A new ASR tool: aTrain

At the end of March, we got the first version of our paper back to the LREC-COLING workshop about Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (Workshops – LREC-Coling 2024). We needed to modify some...

Update Whisper Large Model

OpenAI is pleased to announce the latest iteration of Whisper, called large-v3. Whisper-v3 has the same architecture as the previous large models except some minor differences. The large-v3 model...

How Might We Create Better Benchmarks for Speech Recognition?

The applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are proliferating, in part due to re-cent significant quality improvements. However, as recent work indicates, even state-of-the-art...

How researchers digitally preserve Holocaust evidence

Das E-Learning-Projekt „Musik im KZ Theresienstadt“ soll Schülerinnen und Schülern Grundlagenwissen über das Lager vermitteln. (The e-learning project "Music in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp"...