# Autoscribe: An automated tool for creating transcribed TextGrids from audio-recorded conversations

## TL;DR

Autoscribe is a tool that automatically transcribes and segments audio conversations into time-aligned text files, saving researchers significant time.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is an automated tool specifically designed for conversational audio rather than monologues.

## Key findings

- Autoscribe reduced active working time for TextGrid creation by over 70%.
- The tool achieved 92% transcription accuracy and 95% utterance boundary placement accuracy.

## Abstract

One major difficulty in conversational research is the time required to segment and transcribe conversational recordings. While recent advances have improved automatic speech recognition technologies, one limitation of current tools is that they are generally catered toward speech that occurs in monologues rather than conversation. Accordingly, the purpose of this project was to develop and validate an automated user-friendly tool for transcribing conversations. This tool, called Autoscribe, converts dyadic conversational audio recordings into Praat TextGrids with time-aligned turn boundaries between speech and non-speech segments and transcripts of all spoken dialogue output. Here we describe the development of this tool as well as its validation on two conversational corpora. Results showed that Autoscribe decreased the amount of active working time needed for TextGrid creation by over 70%. Average transcription accuracy was 92% and average utterance boundary placement of 95%. Thus, Autoscribe affords a practical research tool that drastically reduces the time and resource intensitivity needed for conversational segmentation and transcription.