The Thoughts and Ramblings of Steve

Tag: audio

  • Some lovely live piano music to bring a smile, take 2

    I’ve spent way too much time at the hospital recently as my wife has been dealing with cardiac issues. One neat thing about this particular hospital though, is that they have someone who plays live piano music. Whether I’m nervous, scared, or just waiting, the live music never fails to bring me a little bit of joy. And so I thought I might record some of that music and share what I hope is at least a little joy with all of you. Apologies that this recording isn’t the best, but it’s the best I could do from my phone.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Some lovely live piano music to bring a smile

  • A quick comparison and test of recording with both the Zoom H1E and Roland CS-10EM

    Recently, I discovered the Roland CS-10EM, a binaural headset that can be used with a variety of recorders. I thought I’d give this a try because my previous binaural solution was reliant on equipment that is no longer being made. I received the CS-10EM just the other day, but, until yesterday, hadn’t really had the opportunity to test it. Last night though, while out having pizza with a friend, I realized that I had the perfect opportunity.

    For anyone who has not experienced binaural audio, it’s best listened to through headphones. Binaural recording is a way of capturing audio in the way that a person would actually hear the audio meaning that spacially, sound can be heard in all directions, not just from the left and right like typical stereo. In the audio that follows, I record with the Zoom H1e, a fantastic stereo recorder in its own right, and also the Roland CS-10Em to make it possible to hear the difference. I should note that in the interest of keeping things simple, I have not edited the recording in any way. One thing you may notice is that when I switch over to the Roland, it’s actually easier to hear people at other tables than it is to hear me. This is because with binaural recording, the person making the recording is sort of in the center of everything and so from that perspective, sound coming from other directions is easier to capture.

    I hope you enjoy. Also, a big shoutout and thank-you to Randi for letting me use some of our pizza time to geek out with some audio equipment.

  • Playing around with Aiko, an amazing, accessible transcription app for Mac and iOS

    I recently heard about this fantastic app, available for both Mac OS and iOS, called Aiko which leverages AI technology to transcribe audio. What sets Aiko apart from similar solutions though include, in part:

    • It’s free, totally free.
    • Audio can be dictated directly into the app, or a pre-recorded file can be imported. I’m particularly excited about this second piece.
    • Everything happens on the end-user’s device, nothing is sent to the cloud.
    • Multiple languages are supported, we’re talking a lot of languages: 100 languages according to Aiko’s home page.

    I was excited to test out this fascinating technology and so to really put it through it’s paces, in a sub-optimal recording environment, I decided to record some audio using my Apple Watch, while standing outside with lots of traffic and other background noise. What follows is the unedited output of my little experiment. I’m also adding the actual recorded audio, so that you can get a sense of the crummy audio I gave Aiko to work with.

    Hello, and thanks for joining me today.

    I’m playing with an app called AIKO.

    It’s an app that leverages Whisper, which is a technology made by OpenAI, the folks that brought us ChatGPT.

    Now unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, I’m sure you’ve heard quite a lot about ChatGPT and the fascinating possibilities it opens up to us.

    Anyway, Whisper, and on top of that this AIKO app, allow transcription of audio.

    The interesting thing about it is that you can record directly in the AIKO app, or you can import audio, say from a file that was pre-recorded.

    For example, you might have a pre-recorded audio file of a lecture or a class.

    You would be able to import it into this AIKO app, transcription would happen, and then you would have the output as text.

    For my test today, I’m standing outside in front of my house recording on my Apple Watch with traffic going by.

    And the reason I’m doing this is because I wanted to come up with a very sub-optimal recording environment, just to better understand how the technology would deal with audio recorded in such an environment.

    I’m also trying to speak as naturally as I can without saying words like um and uh, things that I think often get said when speaking.

    The interesting thing about AIKO and the way that it transcribes audio is that it supposedly is able to insert punctuation correctly.

    I’m not sure if it does anything about paragraphs or not, but as the speaker, I don’t have any way of controlling format.

    Once you run a file or recording through AIKO, the output is rendered as text.

    However, there are a few things you can do with it.

    First, you can of course copy the text into some other application.

    The other thing that you can do is have the text be timestamped.

    The reason that this can be handy is that you can use that then to create files that can be used as closed captioning for videos.

    Anyway, it is kind of loud out here, and so I will go back inside.

    I also didn’t want to make this too long because I’m not sure if it’ll work at all or how accurate it’ll be, but my plan is to post this to the blog without editing it.

    Stop, stop, stop.

    Aiko-generated transcription from my Apple Watch recording.

    One final note, the dictation ends with the words “stop stop”.  I didn’t actually speak those words, but because I have VoiceOver activated on my Apple Watch, they were picked up in the recording as I located and activated the stop button.  This is definitely incredible technology and the price certainly can’t be beat. From an accessibility perspective, I found Aiko to be extremely accessible with VoiceOver on both Mac and IOS and since it is a native app using native controls, I feel confident that it will work with other assistive technologies as well. You can find more information about Aiko, including FAQs, links to app store pages and more here.

  • Demonstrating iReg, an app that allows recording on the Apple Watch

    Earlier this morning, I heard of iReg, an app that allows one to make audio recordings on the Apple Watch. In this brief episode, I provide a brief overview of the app. Darren Duff, @Darren_Duff on Twitter, has done a far more in-depth demo for those wishing to learn more.

  • Let’s have a bit of weather

    We’re getting freezing rain outside and as it sounded kind of neat to me, I thought I’d share it with you.

  • Demo of Direct Touch Typing on iOS8

    In this audio demo, I discuss the new Direct Touch Typing input method introduced in iOS8 and show how it works with VoiceOver.

  • Audio Demo of adding a card to Apple Pay using the iPhone camera

    Apple’s new Apple Pay feature allows the iPhone camera to be used to add a new credit card. In this brief audio demo, I walk through this surprisingly accessible process using VoiceOver.

  • Some rain, thunder and a little wind as recorded with the Zoom IQ5 iPhone mic

    We just had a brief thunder storm pass through, so I thought it’d be a great opportunity to again play with the Zoom IQ5 iPhone mic.

  • Brief demo of the Yo app

    In this brief episode, I demonstrate the Yo app, an ultra simple, somewhat ridiculous app that has gone viral in recent months.