Tomorrow I’ll be teaching a course in HUMlab on transcribing and analyzing video. The main focus of the course will be on Transana, and I will demonstrate how I’ve used this free software in my own transcription and analysis work and let the course participants try it out for themselves.

In Transana, as in most tools of this kind, transcription is done manually. I have been looking around for examples of software attempting to automatically transcribe sound files, but what I have found so far are tools used by one individual, training them to understand his or her speech. I suspect these existing tools would not be able to transcribe more complex interactions.

If anyone knows of tools with automatic transcription which might be able to handle more complex material, please let me know. Even if such tools would exist, of course one would have to go over the automatically generated transcripts in relation to the sound files manually anyway, both in order to check the transcription, and not least also in order to find the subtle nuances conveyed in extralinguistic cues. No matter how advanced technology might have become, I suspect the computer would not be able to detect these types of cues. Not yet anyway.