zlacker

>>eloran+(OP)
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have.

It's an interesting business to be in these days...

>>blanto+h7
Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.

>>autojo+ww1
Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct and vote on transcriptions.

My goal is to train my own models on the corrected transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively.

I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today) once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.

>>lunixb+rA1
I thought there were some open source speech-to-text models already [1].

Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective?

[1] https://voice.mozilla.org/en

>>ciaran+1B1
I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.

>>lunixb+cB1
As you’re well aware but HN folks may not be, it’s not just that it’s noisy, it’s heavily coded, contextually bankrupt speech between multiple parties that spend all day in contact with each other. Dispatchers in particular seem to have superhuman ability to extract information from completely unintelligible garbage.

Are you doing any kind of speaker identification?

>>jcims+vF1
This is a very accurate description of the problem space. Every municipality has their own jargon, vernacular, and ways to communicate brevity which is key in public safety communications. The communications are often digitized over vocoders that are less than optimal, and then you have the process of recovering voice from noisy communcations channels.

This is definitely a very hard problem to solve.

>>blanto+gL1
Indeed. The only reason I know is that I tried a few years back and realized that I was asking the computer to do something that I couldn't even do. Anyone that doubts it, just listen to the NYPD feed and try to transcribe for just a minute or two.

https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890

(edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days. Would love to have a comment/live chat option if your backlog is getting bare :))