pietrop
commented
6 years ago Hey @sedubois, Apologies for the late reply. At the time of the development after extensive research it turned out that Watson as the best option. Now this would need to be revisited.
However I was working on a branch to add google STT as an option but the google node SDK is not compatible with electron, and that complicates things considerably, so that's on hold for now.
Others to consider adding are
- Speechmatics
- Microsoft Bing Speech API
- Baidu STT
- etc..
I'd also welcome input on adding more effective open source alternatives such as Tensorflow, I personally haven't got my head around that yet.
Closing this for now, unless you are interested in helping out exploring some of this options further.
Best
Pietro
I was just curious why IBM watson was used as the API for this tool? (I'm not considering Gentle which is described as not being so performant.)
Watson works great but I guess it could add quite some value to integrate other APIs as well. For example, Google's speech API supports 101 languages and offers 1 hour of free transcription per month. There are probably quite a few other APIs available as well, and more are bound to come.
As far as open-source is concerned, I also wondered about alternatives to Gentle? For example Tensorflow open-sourced by Google (AFAIK).