‘European Alternatives’ is a repository helping to find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.
Source: https://european-alternatives.eu/.
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aTrain is a tool for automatically transcribing speech recordings utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models without uploading any data to the internet. It was developed by researchers at the Business Analytics and Data Science-Center at the University of Graz and tested by researchers from the Know-Center Graz. aTrain offers:
- Fast and accurate aTrain provides a user friendly access to the faster-whisper implementation of OpenAI’s Whisper model, ensuring best in class transcription quality paired with higher speeds on your local computer. Transcription when selecting the highest-quality model takes only around three times the audio length on current mobile CPUs typically found in middle-class business notebooks (e.g., Core i5 12th Gen, Ryzen Series 6000).
- Speaker detection aTrain has a speaker detection mode and can analyze each text segment to determine which speaker it belongs to.
- Privacy Preservation and GDPR compliance aTrain processes the provided speech recordings completely offline on your own device and does not send recordings or transcriptions to the internet. This helps researchers to maintain data privacy requirements arising from ethical guidelines or to comply with legal requirements such as the GDRP.
- Multi-language support aTrain can process speech recordings in any of the following 57 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
- MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti compatible output aTrain provides transcription files that are seamlessly importable into the most popular tools for qualitative analysis, ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA. This allows you to directly play audio for the corresponding text segment by clicking on its timestamp.
- NVIDIA GPU support aTrain can either run on the CPU or an NVIDIA GPU (CUDA toolkit installation required). A CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPU significantly improves the speed of transcriptions and speaker detection, reducing transcription time to 20% of audio length on current entry-level gaming notebooks.
Installation: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/atrain/9N15Q44SZNS2?hl=de-at&gl=at
Working Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4594103
Further information: https://github.com/BANDAS-Center/aTrain
Read MoreArtCraft is an intentional crafting engine for artists, designers, and filmmakers. With their Crafting Apps, they offer seven apps including image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layouting. The apps are native, open-source apps built in Rust and free to use, and run on macOS, Windows, and Linux, some others of their apps also in the browser.
The github repo can be found here: github.com/storytold/artcraft.
Source: https://getartcraft.com/apps.
Read MoreA list of tech platforms for productivity purposes, as alternatives to larger platforms.
Read MorenoScribe is an AI-based software designed for transcribing audio, particularly useful for qualitative social research and journalistic interviews. The software is free, open-source (licensed under GPL-3.0), and operates entirely offline, meaning no data is sent to the cloud, ensuring privacy. It can recognize up to 99 languages and distinguish between different speakers, which is particularly helpful for interviews with multiple participants.
The software includes an editor that allows users to review, verify, and correct the transcriptions manually. It utilizes advanced AI models, such as OpenAI’s Whisper, faster-whisper by Guillaume Klein, and pyannote by Hervé Bredin, for the transcription process.
It requires a relatively up-to-date computer to function efficiently, slower systems may result in long transcription times. The software is around 3.7 GB, poor audio quality may lead to transcription errors.
noScribe aims to reduce the difficulty of transcription for researchers and journalists, offering a reliable, private, and easy-to-use tool for processing interviews.
Find a review of noScribe (in German) here: https://sozmethode.hypotheses.org/2315.
Source: https://github.com/kaixxx/noScribe
Read MoreIn collaboration with the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Canton of Zurich, the Zurich Cantonal Police, the Zurich City Police and the Winterthur City Police, a team from the Statistical Office of the Canton of Zurich has developed a prototype app that automatically transcribes confidential audio and video files. Also in Swiss German.
The app is open-source and based on the Whisper v3 Large model, which enables transcriptions up to 15 times faster than in real time – without license or usage costs. The app offers a wide range of functions such as automatic speaker recognition, multi-file upload, predefined vocabulary and various export options. Transcripts can be edited directly in the application and linked synchronously with the source file.
Hardware requirements: recommend using a CUDA-compatible graphics card with at least 8GB VRAM, as transcription on a CPU is extremely slow.
Source: https://github.com/machinelearningZH/audio-transcription.
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