Want to help?

[davatron5000]

Hi there! Thanks for your interest. You're already helping. As you may already know, I want to try and build an HTML5 captioning app using Chrome's webkitSpeechRecognition API. I'm thinking it could be a tiny Node/Express app that sets up a Socket.IO to broadcast the transcription results.

I've never deployed with any of these so I don't know anything, but it seems super doable. You help is invaluable. Thanks.

[matthewbivins]

Dave,
My wife is deaf and 8 times out of 10 she's the frustrated person in the back row you mentioned in your article. I'm a relative noob in the world of FrEDs, but I have the passion and desire for this app, and can pass your article on to people that know more than me. I'd love to see Wordcast happen, thanks for even thinking of this.
Matt Bivins

[davatron5000]

@matthewbivins Thanks, Matthew! Hopefully we can get something up and going soon. Don't worry about n00bness, every little bit helps. Also, I don't want to volunteer your wife or anything, but she sounds like she'd be really helpful in giving us a 👍 / 👎 as we progress. Thanks for helping!

[JasonHoffmann]

Hey Dave! Thanks for doing this. I'd like to echo Matt, I'm fairly new to the world of HTML API's / Node, but would love to help. My fiancee is an audiologist, so on the flip side I'll be sharing this with her and see if she can provide any input. But please let me know how I can help (I can write the hell out of documentation at the very least) and I'll be keeping drag to see if I can dig into the code.

[davatron5000]

Thanks, Jason. Hopefully have something up soon. Started playing around seriously with Socket.io last night. 🙏

[SachaG]

If you want to try and give Meteor* a try for this project, I'd be happy to donate a copy or our book as well as help out however I can if you have any Meteor questions :)

*I think it'd actually be a pretty good fit since it does all the real-time stuff out of the box, and is pretty fast to learn.

[parkerproject]

This can definitely be done with Node/Express, I can jump in, if you tell me more... parkerproject@gmail.com

[aaromnido]

WoW Dave! It's just the kind of thing I'm looking for some time ago!
I worked for seven months in Dublin, Ireland and my English is not very fluent. I thinked some times If can read with subtitles the conversations, meetings, etc. It would be nice to improve more quickly my English. Every time I dreamed with the possibilty of create a kind of iOS/Android app solving this question.
I'm UI Designer and Front developer. ¿Can I help you in the project? aaromnido@gmail.com

[davatron5000]

@SachaG Sweet! Thanks! Re-looking at the demo, that seems like it could get up and running fairly quickly. I assume there's a cost that will one day be associated with deploying Meteor apps. Is there any information/plans about that yet?

@parkerproject I stared playing around a bit with Express/Socket.io, I can push that or I jot down a roadmap, if that would help you.

@aaromnido Thanks. Hopefully it can help you. We may need some UI/Frontend work, but it might actually be very little (just text on a page basically). Will let you know if we need anything.

[SachaG]

Well, there's a couple options. Deploying on *.meteor.com is free and very easy, so it's a good way to get up and running.

Another easy option is Modulus, but it's not free (probably something like $15/month for most apps).

Finally, you can also set up your own instance on Digital Ocean, should be about $5-$10/month.

Oh and if you want to host your database on MongoHQ (not required, but it's sometimes good to separate the DB from the app), that can add another $15/month.

[davatron5000]

@SachaG Cool. Meteor looks great, I just didn't want to back the open project into a paid service too far. Will try it out in a branch and see if it works. No idea about a MongoDB instance yet. Possibly tho if we have "rooms" that need to be persistent.

[JordanForeman]

I would definitely like to get involved with this. I've got a little bit of experience with both express and meteor, so let me know what I can do to help! I'd love to be involved in a project like this.

[vdclouis]

Same here,
I've made webapps with Express/MongoDB and Express/CouchDB. Not a pro though, still learning :)

[davatron5000]

Hey all, I feel like I might be holding this up. It could be next week before I'm able to take another stab. But if someone wants to take the original CodePen and port it into Express or Meteor, by all means, do it and make a pull request.

It doesn't have to be super good right now. And we could even test it by reading technical blog posts to eachother. Here's a mini-roadmap that's in my mind. I can make it more official on the readme:

• Create an alpha node where Computer One can broadcast captions to Computer Two and Computer Three.

After that some user settings might be nice:

• Add broadcaster setting for event.results[i][0].confidence level.
• Add broadcaster setting for user language input.

Then. Once that is off the ground. We can test it and start styling it a bit.

• Beta test with deaf/HH users in a small setting.
• Beta test with deaf/HH users in meetup environment.
• Beta test with deaf/HH users in conference environment.
• Design: Make it look good and be useful.

Super future (optional) stuff I've been mulling around:

• Broadcast audio feed over WebRTC to create a Audio induction loop system. e.g., iPod + headphones == Induction loop.
• Allow stenographers to broadcast captions instead of auto-captioner.
• Allow remote sign interpreters to share video over WebRTC.
• Add settings for User language output (requires Google Translate API)

[billcreswell]

Pretty slick. I was able to use this (codepen version) in Chrome on my phone.

[SachaG]

Should the transcripts be stored? And if so, in what format?

For example, I was thinking it could be useful to store each new transcribed sentence fragment as a separate document with a timestamp. This way, it would be possible to then sync up the transcript with a video afterwards. Any thoughts?