I often have thoughts or ideas when I'm in the car, but I have no easy way to capture them. I have an iPhone, but I don't want to fiddle with it while I'm driving. I'm seeking an app (or possibly a standalone device) that I can safely use while driving. Is there some app that is voice-activated (i.e., without unlocking the phone) and will transcribe short memos? Ideally, I'd like those transcripts to be available in some cloud site, so I can access them via a web browser on my office computer or home computer.

I'd even consider buying a standalone recorder that I can activate just by pushing a button. I looked on Amazon, but I didn't really see anything that can make transcripts and upload them to a cloud site. Just the audio files might work, but it would be much better for me to have transcripts that I can easily access from a computer.

Until recently, Amazon Transcribe supported speech recognition in English and Spanish only.
Now they included French, Italian and Portuguese as well - and a few other languages (including German) are in private beta.

Update March 2019:
Now Amazon Transcribe supports German and Korean as well.

The Auphonic Audio Inspector on the status page of a finished Multitrack Production including speech recognition.
Please click on the screenshot to see it in full resolution!

Amazon Transcribe is integrated as speech recognition engine within Auphonic and offers accurate transcriptions (compared to other services) at low costs, including keywords / custom vocabulary support, word confidence, timestamps, and punctuation.
See the following AWS blog post and video for more information about recent Amazon Transcribe developments: Transcribe speech in three new languages: French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Amazon Transcribe is also a perfect fit if you want to use our Transcript Editor because you will be able to see word timestamps and confidence values to instantly check which section/words should be corrected manually to increase the transcription accuracy:

Screenshot of our Transcript Editor with word confidence highlighting and the edit bar.

These features are also available if you use Speechmatics, but unfortunately not in our other integrated speech recognition services.

About Speech Recognition within Auphonic

Auphonic has built a layer on top of a few external speech recognition services to make audio searchable:
Our classifiers generate metadata during the analysis of an audio signal (music segments, silence, multiple speakers, etc.) to divide the audio file into small and meaningful segments, which are processed by the speech recognition engine. The results from all segments are then combined, and meaningful timestamps, simple punctuation and structuring are added to the resulting text.

To learn more about speech recognition within Auphonic, take a look at our Speech Recognition and Transcript Editor help pages or listen to our Speech Recognition Audio Examples.

A comparison table of our integrated services (price, quality, languages, speed, features, etc.) can be found here: Speech Recognition Services Comparison.

Conclusion

We hope that Amazon and others will continue to add new languages, to get accurate and inexpensive automatic speech recognition in many languages.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or feedback about speech recognition or our transcript editor!

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To celebrate the launch of the Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents campaign, we will be hosting an on-site transcribe-a-thon here at the Library of Congress on March 19, 2020 at 5:00 pm ET! 

Register to join us in person in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building for a fun evening of transcribing with fellow volunteers. You do not need to read Spanish, Latin, or Catalan to participate in this project!

Can't make it to the event? We will have a virtual transcribe-a-thon happening ALL DAY on March 19! Register as a virtual attendee to join a worldwide community of transcribers.

Want to know more about how to host a Transcribe-a-thon so you can join in virtually? Register for our upcoming webinar on instructions and tips for hosting a successful transcription event! We’ll cover how to join in on March 19 and how to organize independently.

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This Veterans Day, learn from veterans of the past – by helping the researchers of tomorrow.

The Library of Congress holds many collections that touch on the lives and service of military personnel; and the human cost of war. Although American Civil War materials fall outside the scope of the Veterans History Project, we encourage you to hone your transcription skills using wartime correspondence. The recently launched crowdsourcing project, crowd.loc.gov/, contains three collections relating to the Civil War: letters written to Abraham Lincoln, the diaries of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, and the papers of disabled veterans' advocate William Oland Bourne (1819-1901), a reformer, poet, clergyman, and editor of the Soldiers Friend journal. 

The mission of the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center is to collect, preserve and make accessible the personal accounts of U.S. veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. Learn more at http://www.loc.gov/vets. Share your exciting VHP initiatives, programs, events and news stories with VHP to be considered for a future RSS. Email vohp@loc.gov and place “My VHP RSS Story” in the subject line.

Visit VHP on Facebook.

Click here for more information.

Anyone can participate in writing word for word transcriptions that will ultimately enrich our catalog records and make the historical content in this collection of Spanish documents more accessible.

To participate, please register via Eventbrite

About the virtual transcribe-a-thon

You can join in as an individual or organize a transcribe-a-thon event wherever you are.

1. Register through Eventbrite so we can get a full count of contributing volunteers!
2. Follow the day's progress via hourly updates here in History Huband shared on our twitter (@Crowd_LOC)
   • We’ll share live updates on campaign activity so be sure to let us know how it’s going wherever you are! We hope you’ll share your event details and let us know what you’re finding in this rich collection.
3. Let us know what you’re up to!We’re always here to answer your questions, but we’ll have some extra opportunities for you to connect with Community Managers and collection experts.
   • Twitter chats:  11am and 2pm EST
     • Follow the conversation for tips and tricks!  Community managers and collection experts will also share more about this amazing collection and answer your questions!
   • Office Hours (via WebEx!):  noon and 3pm EST
     • Talk directly with community managers and collection experts to share what you're finding and get answers to your questions! Join using the links below.
       • 12pm EST office hour
       • 3pm EST office hour
   • Other ways to reach us:
     • Tweet at us anytime!
     • Send us an email at crowd@loc.gov.
4. Have fun! Connect to history and your fellow volunteers through transcription.