Eric,
I tried Docsoft:AV (http://www.docsoft.com/Products/AV/), a server-based solution, about a year ago to see whether we could use it to automatically transcribe and timestamp our oral history recordings. It might work nicely if you had multiple recordings with the same speakers where it would be feasible to train the software by setting up speaker profiles for the individual speaker's voice. The software can output the results in a variety of formats and it handles audio and video recordings.
However, we only had one recording per interviewee (intermixed with the interviewer) and thus would have had to spend way more time and money on training the software (and cleaning up the results, which were hardly comprehensible) than if we had an actual person listen to the recordings and transcribe them. To be fair to Docsoft, some speakers had strong accents and the audio quality was not ideal, but that's what we needed it for.
So, it did not seem to be a feasible solution for this particular problem and we stuck with a wetware-based approach.
Markus
Markus Wust
Digital Collections and Preservation Librarian
Digital Scholarship and Publishing Center
North Carolina State University Libraries
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