Audio mining

**3fingersalute** · January 24th, 2006, 09:45 AM

I work an educational facility, and have been asked by a director to look into a solution that would allow us to record classroom activity both visually and audibly, and then allow us to "search" the recordings later for key words/phrases. From what little research I have done to this point, it appears I will need some sort of audio mining software; I am wondering if anybody is familiar with any software solutions availbale that can accomplish this ?

Any help/thoughts/comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

**shamus** · January 24th, 2006, 11:36 AM

Google brings up a few. Being on the educational end like yourself I use a cheaper method - a key logger. Anything typed on the keyboard is saved as a text file, including the users name. I know that's not as specific a solution as the one your looking for. Just an alternate idea.

**3fingersalute** · January 24th, 2006, 11:37 AM

Originally Posted by shamus

Google brings up a few. Being on the educational end like yourself I use a cheaper method - a key logger. Anything typed on the keyboard is saved as a text file, including the users name. I know that's not as specific a solution as the one your looking for. Just an alternate idea.

yeah, but they're looking to observe teachers instructing and then be able to search the conversations, so the keylogger doesn't help in this case.

**shamus** · January 24th, 2006, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by 3fingersalute

yeah, but they're looking to observe teachers instructing and then be able to search the conversations, so the keylogger doesn't help in this case.

I didn't realize you wanted to spy on the teachers!...

Here's an interesting site I found. Good explanations and software is listed at the bottom of the page. Maybe this'll help you out:
http://www.jmdl.com/howard/audio-mining.html

**3fingersalute** · January 24th, 2006, 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by shamus

I didn't realize you wanted to spy on the teachers!...

Here's an interesting site I found. Good explanations and software is listed at the bottom of the page. Maybe this'll help you out:
http://www.jmdl.com/howard/audio-mining.html

The idea here is that the classroom activity is monitored and recorded both visually and audibly, and everything is recorded and stored digitally, and then later, a software program can scan the files for keywords or phrases. The software needs to be able to scan through the video files, and translate the audio to text and then search the text for whatever search term the user desires.

It sounded far fetched to me, but a little research has shown that it is possible, and has actually been in use since about 1999. Nexidia seems to be the leader in the field of "audio mining" so we are going to take a look there as well as Dragon's Audio Mining software.

**shamus** · January 24th, 2006, 01:33 PM

Aurix - Aurix audio miner

Aurix audio miner - phonetic audio mining software.

BBN

BBN audio indexer - LVCSR audio mining system.

CallMiner

CallMiner - Speech analytics software.

Nexidia - FastTalk

FastTalk - phonetic audio mining software ("phonetic search engine").

ScanSoft

ScanSoft speech indexing - LVCSR audio mining system.

Witness Systems

Witness systems - Speech analytics for call centres.