Grad E: Don't worry about it w d that 's that 's the close talking mikes . Try it on the P Z Ms and and
Professor B: Yeah , which I would which well n n n n
PhD D: So the real value of the database is these ?
PhD H: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah .
Grad E: Yeah , abso well no but
Professor B: I mean there 's still just the w the percentages and , I mean they 're not a as we 've talked about before there 's probably overlaps
PhD C: This i yeah . This is not that good .
Professor B: there 's probably overlaps in in uh in fair number in Switchboard as well so but but there 's other phenomena , it 's a meeting , it 's a different thing and there 's lots of stuff to learn with the close talking mikes but uh yeah certainly I 'd like to see as soon as we could , I mean maybe get some of the glitches out of the way but soon as we could how well it does with say with the P Z Ms or maybe even one of the
PhD C: Right .
Professor B: and uh see if it 's , you know is it a hundred twenty percent or maybe it 's not maybe if with some adaptation you get this down to fifty percent or forty - five percent or something and and then if for the PZM it 's seventy or something like that that 's actually something we could sort of work with a little bit
PhD C: Yeah .
Professor B: so
PhD C: No I think it 's really , I mean this way we least have a baseline we know that for instance the transcripts are very good so once you can get to the words that the recognizer which is a total subset of the things you need to understand the the text um yeah they 're pretty good so and and it 's converting automatically from the XML to the chopping up the wave forms and so forth it 's not the case that the end of one utterance is in the next segment and things like that which we had more problems with in Switchboard so that 's good . And um let 's see there was one more thing I wanted to to mention I can't remember um Sorry can't remember . anyway it 's Postdoc G: Congratulations is really great .
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD C: well it was , I mean I really didn't do this myself
Grad E: Yeah , it 's really good .
PhD C: so Andreas set up this recognizer and by the way the recognizer all the files I 'm moving to SRI and running everything there so I brought back just these result files and people can look at them um so
PhD A: We we talked about setting up the SRI recognizer here . That 's you know if if there are more machines um uh here plus people can could run their own uh you know variants of of of the recognition runs um certainly doable . Um .
Professor B: Yeah and well certainly if the recognition as opposed to training , yeah .
PhD A: Yeah .
Professor B: Seems reasonable .
Postdoc G: I need t Hmm . I need to ask one question .
PhD A: Yeah .
Postdoc G: Which is um so this issue of the uh legalistic aspects of the pre - sent you know pre - adapted Yeah , well , so what I mean is um the uh the data that you take into SRI , first first question , you 're maintaining it in in a place that wouldn't be publicly readable that that kind of stuff , right ?
PhD A: U um
PhD C: From the outside world or
Postdoc G: By uh people uh who are not associated with this project .
PhD A: Oh .
Grad E: It 's human subjects issues , I told you about that .
PhD C: Um oh .
Postdoc G: Exactly .
PhD C: Well OK we have n no names . Although I sh um
Grad E: That that 's not the issue ,
PhD C: de audio data itself ?
Grad E: it 's just the audio data itself , until people have a chance to edit it .
Postdoc G: Mm - hmm , exactly .
PhD C: Uh so well I can I can protect my directories through there .
Postdoc G: Yeah .
PhD C: Right now they 're not they 're in the speech group directories which so I will Postdoc G: Great .
PhD C: I didn't know that actually .
Professor B: Yeah so we just have to go through this process of having people approve the transcriptions ,
PhD C: Yeah OK .
Professor B: say it 's OK .
PhD C: Right OK .
Postdoc G: Yeah , we had to get them to approve em and then i cuz cuz the other question I was gonna ask is if we 're having um you know it 's but this this meeting that you have , no problem cuz I I well I mean I I speak for myself
Grad E: It 's us .
Postdoc G: but but I think that we didn't do anything that but well anyway so uh I wouldn't be too concerned about it with respect to that although we should clear it with Eric and Dan of course but these results are based on data which haven't had the uh haven't had the chance to be reviewed by the subjects
PhD C: That 's true .
Postdoc G: and I don't know how that stands , I mean if you if you get fantastic results and it 's involving {comment} data which which later end up being lessened by , you know certain elisions , then I don't know but I wanted to raise that issue ,
Professor B: Well we ,
Postdoc G: that 's all .
Professor B: I mean once we get all this streamlined it may be sh it hopefully it will be fairly quick but we get the transcriptions , people approve them and so on it 's just that we 're
Grad E: Alright we need to work at a system for doing that approval so that we can send people the transcripts
Postdoc G: Great .
PhD A: Mmm .
Postdoc G: Yeah .
Grad E: and get back any bleeps that they want
PhD C: Yeah actually the bleeps are also an issue I thought .
Professor B: It 's gonna be a rare thing that there 's a bleep for the most part .
PhD A: U uh actually I had a question about the downsampling , um I don't know who , I mean how this was done but is is there are there any um issues with downsampling
PhD C: Don did this .
PhD A: because I know that the recognizer um that we use h can do it sort of on the fly um so we wouldn't have to have it eh you know do it uh explicitly beforehand . And is there any um i are there other d sev uh is there more than one way to do the downsampling where one might be better than another ?
Grad F: There are lots of w there are lots of ways to do the downsampling um different filters to put on ,
PhD A: OK . Right . OK .
Grad F: like anti - aliasing stuff .
PhD A: So so the th
Grad E: I don't think we even know which one I assume you 're using syncat to do it ?
Grad F: No , I 'm using uh SN SND uh are resample .
Grad E: Or sound resample ?
PhD C: Re - re ref
Grad E: Resample .
PhD C: yeah .
Grad E: Yeah and Dan 's archaic acronyms .
Grad F: RSMP . Yeah , I don't really .
PhD C: Missing all the vowels .
Grad F: I just yeah I found it .
PhD C: Some of the vowels ,
Grad E: Not all of them .
PhD C: almost all the vowels , that 's the hard part .
PhD A: So so the other thing we should try is to just take the original wave forms ,
Grad E: And a few of the consonants .
PhD A: I mean segment them but not downsample them .
PhD C: Yeah we could we could try that and and compare
PhD A: And and feed them to feed them to the SRI recognizer and see if if the SRI front - end does something .
Grad F: Yeah , that 's PhD C: Yeah .
Grad E: I suspect that 's sort of premature optimization , but Sure .
PhD C: We can try it . I I only downsampled them first cuz I was
PhD A: Well Grad F: I mean that 's just one line that 's one line of code to comment at
PhD C: yeah
PhD A: Right and and it doesn't is no more work for um you know for us .
Grad F: so
Grad E: Mm - hmm .
Grad F: Yeah .
PhD C: Well they 're just bigger to transfer , that 's why I s downsampled them before but
PhD A: Well but they 're only twice as big so
PhD C: Well I mean that was if it 's the same then we can downsample here
PhD A: I mean it 's it 's just a
PhD C: but if it 's Grad F: Although those eighty meg files take a while to copy into my directories
PhD C: Yeah .
Grad F: so , but no , I mean it 's not i it wouldn't be a problem if you 're interested in it PhD C: We could try that .
PhD A: Yeah I mean it would be uh you know it would probably take uh about um you know
Grad F: it would PhD A: minus the transfer time it would it would take uh you know ten minutes to try and and and
Grad F: Yeah .
Grad E: It 's about a fifty minute drive , right ?
PhD A: And and if for some reason we see that it works better then we might investigate why
PhD C: Well it takes more disk space too so I was just PhD A: and , you know , what Yeah .
Grad F: Mmm . In the front - end we could do that .
PhD A: Yeah .
Professor B: So you just train just different filters
Grad F: Yeah , I Professor B: and so you 're just wondering whether the filter is
Grad F: Yeah , I can imagine it would be PhD A: Right . Right .
PhD C: So we could try that with this particular twenty minutes of speech and sort of see if there 's any differences .
Grad F: I mean I guess there 's some PhD A: You know a at some point someone might have optimized whatever filtering is done for the actual recognition um performance .
Grad F: Hmm .
PhD A: So in other words right ,
Professor B: Right .
PhD A: so
Grad E: It just seems to me that , you know small changes to the language model and the vocabulary will so swamp that that it may be premature to worry about that . I mean so one is a half a percent better than the other I don't think that gives you any information .
PhD C: Well it 's just as easy to to give you the sixteen K individual ,
Grad E: Yep .
PhD C: it was just more disk space you know for storing them
Professor B: Are you are you using uh uh mel cepstrum or PLP over there ?
PhD C: so
PhD A: Mel cepstrum .
Professor B: So probably doesn't matter .
PhD C: Well we could try .
Grad F: There 's there 's your answer .
Professor B: But but it wouldn't hurt to try ,
PhD C: Could easily try
PhD A: That 's what I would assume but you never know ,
Professor B: yeah .
PhD C: so
PhD A: you know .
Professor B: Sure . No the reason I say this
Postdoc G: Just Mm - hmm .
Professor B: PLP uses uh auto - regressive filtering and uh modeling and so it can be sensitive to the kind of filtering that you 're doing
PhD A: Mm - hmm .
Professor B: but uh uh mel cepstrum uh might not b you wouldn't expect to be so much but
PhD C: Well we can try it if you generate like the same set of files just up to that point where we stopped anyway and just sti stick them somewhere
Grad F: Yeah , it 's it 's really not a problem .
PhD A: Actually , no .
PhD C: and I 'll rerun it with
PhD A: Don't stop . Don't stop at that part because we 're actually using the entire conversation to estimate the speaker parameters ,
Grad F: Keep going . Yeah .
PhD A: so shouldn't use you should s you know , get
Grad F: Yeah , I mean I 'll I have to do is eh e the reference file would stay the same ,
PhD C: OK .
PhD A: Right .
Grad F: it 's just the individual segments would be approximately twice as long
PhD A: Mmm .
PhD C: Right . Right .
Grad F: and I could just replace them with the bigger ones in the directory ,
PhD A: Right .
PhD C: I mean I corrected all Grad E: Yeah .
Grad F: that 's not a problem .
PhD C: I mean I hand - edited the whole the whole meeting so that can be run it 's just Once we get the the bug out .
PhD A: Mmm .
Postdoc G: One one question which is I I had the impression {comment} from this from this meeting that w that I transcribed that um that there was already automatic downsampling occurring ,
PhD A: Yeah . Mm - hmm .
Postdoc G: is that I thought that in order to
Grad E: Yep .
Postdoc G: so it was so it 's like there 's already down
Grad E: There 's one level that 's already happening right here .
Professor B: This is being recorded at forty - eight kilohertz . Which is more that anybody needs
Postdoc G: OK .
Grad E: Right .
Grad F: Oh .
Grad E: And it gets downsampled to sixteen .
Postdoc G: OK .
Professor B: so
PhD C: And that 's actually said in your meeting ,
Grad F: Hmm .
Postdoc G: Oh OK .
PhD C: that 's how I know that .
Postdoc G: That 's exactly , and that 's how I know it .
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD C: I I It 's like are we downsampling to sixteen ?
Professor B: It 's a digital audio orientation for the board
PhD C: Right .
PhD A: Mmm .
Professor B: it 's in the monitor so it 's
PhD C: Thank God it 's not more than that .
Grad E: So Professor B: Yeah .
Grad E: And I have no idea what filter it 's using ,
Grad F: Is eight kilohertz is is eighty kilohertz generally accepted as like standard for voice ?
Grad E: so
Professor B: For telephone stuff .
Grad E: Telephone .
PhD D: Telephone .
Grad F: Yeah that 's what I was gonna say , I mean like Professor B: So it 's it 's it 's just that they were operating from Switchboard which was a completely telephone database
Grad F: so Oh , I see , so .
Professor B: and so that was a standard for that sixteen s
Grad F: OK .
Grad E: So sixteen seems to be pretty typical for with this sort of thing .
Professor B: Sixteen is more common for for uh broadband stuff that isn't Grad F: Right .
Grad E: That isn't music .
Professor B: that isn't music and isn't telephone ,
PhD C: And I guess if you 're comparing like uh if you wanna run recognition on the PZM stuff you would want you don't want to downsample the wh that
Professor B: yeah .
Grad E: Why is that ?
Professor B: I don't know .
PhD C: right ? Well I don I mean if it 's any better
Professor B: No actually I would think that you would you would get better you 'd get better high frequencies in the local mike .
Grad E: All the way around I 'd think .
Professor B: Uh but who knows ? I mean we do we we we we we wanna find all this stuff out ,
PhD C: Yeah well we could try it .
Grad E: Yeah .
Professor B: we don't know .
Grad E: We 're gonna have plenty of low frequency on the P Z Ms with the fans .
PhD C: OK . Yeah .
Professor B: Uh yeah . Yeah .
PhD C: Oh yeah there was just one more thing I wanted to say which is totally unrelated to the recognition except that um well well it 's sort of related but um good news also uh I got well Chuck Fillmore agreed to record meetings but he had too many people in his meetings and that 's too bad cuz they 're very animated and but uh Jerry also agreed so uh we 're starting on on
PhD A: They 're less animated .
PhD C: Well but he has fewer he he won't have more than eight and it 's a meeting on even deeper understanding , EDU , so that sounds interesting . As a compliment to our front - end meeting
Grad E: Dot EDU ?
PhD C: and um so that 's gonna start Monday and one of the things that I was realizing is um it would be really great if anyone has any ideas on some kind of time synchronous way that people in the meeting can make a comment to the person whose gonna transcribe it or or put a push a button or something when they wanna make a note about " oh boy you should probably erase those last few " or uh " wait I want this not to be recorded now " or uh something like that s
Professor B: Weren't we gonna do something with a pad at one point ?
Postdoc G: The cross pads ?
Grad E: Yeah , we could do it with the cross pads .
PhD C: Cuz I was thinking you know if if the person who sets up the meeting isn't there and it 's a group that we don't know um and this came up talking to to Jerry also that you know is there any way for them to indicate to make sure that the qu request that they have that they make explicitly get addressed somehow
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD C: so I don't know if anyone has ideas or you could even write down " oh it 's about three twenty five and " Professor B: Well what I was just suggesting is is we have these this cross pad just for this purpose
Grad E: Yeah , and use that .
Professor B: and just use that
Grad E: Not a bad idea .
Professor B: and if we sink it in PhD C: That would be great .
Professor B: The other thing is eh
PhD C: That be great .
Professor B: I don't know if you know this or if it 's a question for the mail to Dan but is this thing of two eight channel boards a maximum for this setup or could we go to a third board ?
Grad E: I don't know . I don't know . I 'll send mail to Dan and ask . I I think that it 's the maximum we can do without a lot of effort because it 's one board with two digital channels .
Professor B: Oh it is one board .
Grad E: E eight each . So it it takes two fibers in to the one board . And so w I think if we wanna do that more than that we 'd have to have two boards , and then you have the synchronization issue .
Professor B: But that 's a question because that would if it was possible cuz it is i you know already we have a a a group of people in this room that cannot all be miked
Grad E: Right .
Professor B: and it 's not just cuz we haven't been to the store , right it 's PhD D: What is the limit on each of those f fiber channels , is it the
Grad E: Eight .
PhD D: It just it 's eight channels come in , does it have do with the sampling rate ?
Grad E: It 's eight . I have no idea . But each each fiber channel has eight eight channels and there are two ch two fibers that go in to the card .
Professor B: It might be a hard limitation ,
Grad E: So
Professor B: I mean one thing is it the whole thing as I said is is all structured in terms of forty - eight kilohertz sampling so that pushes requirements up a bit
Grad E: Yeah .
Professor B: but
PhD D: I was just wondering if if that could change .
Grad E: I mean then we 'd also have to get another ADD and another mixer and all that sort of stuff .
PhD D: If we could drop that .
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad E: So I I 'll send a mail to Dan and ask him .
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad E: OK on the uh are we done with that ? So the oth topic is uh getting more mikes and different mikes , so I got a quote um We can fit we have room for one more wireless and the wireless , this unit here is three fifty three hundred fifty dollars , it I didn't realize but we also have to get a tuner the receiver the other end , that 's uh four thirty um and then also
PhD C: For for each ?
PhD D: Wow .
PhD C: I mean the tuner is four thirty for each .
Grad E: Yep .
PhD C: Wow .
Grad E: And we just need one more so so
Professor B: Yeah at least w we got the good ones .
Grad E: Yeah . So that 's you know something like seven hundred eighty bucks for one more of these .
Professor B: Yeah . OK .
Grad E: Um and then also um It turns out that the connector that this thing uses is proprietary of Sony
PhD D: Oh .
Grad E: believe it or not and Sony only sells this headset .
Postdoc G: Mmm .
Grad E: So if we wanna use a different set headset the solution that the guy suggested and they apparently lots of people have done is Sony will sell you the jack with just wires coming out the end and then you can buy a headset that has pigtail and solder it yourself . And that 's the other solution and so the jacks are forty bucks apiece and the he recommended um a crown CM three eleven AE headset for two hundred bucks apiece .
Professor B: There isn't this some sort of thing that plugs in , you actually have to go and do the soldering yourself ?
Grad E: Becau - the reason is the only only thing you can get that will plug into this is this mike or just the connector .
Professor B: No I understand . The reason I ask is these sort of handmade uh wiring jobs fall apart in use so the other thing is to see if we can uh get them to do a custom job and put it together for this .
Grad E: Oh I 'm sure they would , they would just charge us ,
PhD D: Well , and they 'd probably want quantity too ,
Grad E: so .
Professor B: Well
PhD D: they 'd
Professor B: no they 'll just charge us more , so it 's this
PhD D: Mmm .
Grad E: So so my question is should we go ahead and get na nine identical head - mounted crown mikes ?
Professor B: Not before having one come here and have some people try it out .
Grad E: OK .
Professor B: Because there 's no point in doing that if it 's not gonna be any better .
Grad E: So why don't we get one of these with the crown with a different headset ?
Professor B: Yeah .
Grad E: And and see if that works .
Professor B: And see if it 's preferable and if it is then we 'll get more .
PhD C: Comfort .
Grad E: Yeah .
Professor B: Yeah .
PhD C: Cuz I mean I think the microphones are OK it 's just the the
Grad E: Right , it 's just they 're not comfortable to wear .
Professor B: Right .
PhD C: Could make our own handbands and
Grad E: Um , and he said they don't have any of these in stock but they have them in LA and so it will take about a week to get here .
Professor B: Yeah well it 's Grad E: Um so OK to just go order ?
Professor B: We 're in this for the long term , yeah . Just order it .
Grad E: OK
PhD C: It 's a lot of money for a handband .
Grad E: and who is the contact if I wanna do an invoice