More advanced text editing

[sedubois]

Thanks for this tool! We're creating guided meditations for Imagine Clarity and it allows us the following workflow:

1. record ad libitum in English
2. transcribe with autoEdit then export transcription to plain text
3. edit text as needed somewhere else
4. record English audio professionally with the edited text as visual support
5. translate edited text to French
6. record French audio similarly

In our case, basically we don't need the paperedits feature, as each recording is independent, and each recording contains almost exactly what we need for the transcription, except for some words or sentences which are repeated when the speaker wants to rephrase his speech. So what we can use is the Transcriptions > Edit tab.

However, we are then forced to do step 3 (text editing) outside of it as there is limited text editing possible, but we lose the benefit of having a seamless sync between speech and text, i.e. we can't do a text search in the audio, etc.

With some more capabilities, the tool could offer a fantastic editing experience (and thus be true to its name 😉):

• reintroducing punctuation and sentence boundaries (as special characters "between" the words) and to add/remove line breaks. So that the text can be re-organized in a coherent sequence of paragraphs with proper, grammatically correct sentences.
• moving the text cursor around (between and within words) by using the keyboard arrow keys. Currently you can only navigate within each single word. Would be great to seamlessly move in and out of the words just with the keyboard.
• selecting several words with a drag of the mouse or a double/tripe-click, just like we would select text in a text block. Then being able to delete the selected text when hitting backspace. There could be two deletion modes, just deleting the detected text, or deleting the text and the corresponding audio from the source. This second deletion feature isn't needed for ad lib audio, as we re-record afterwards, but it's needed to edit the final recording.
• allowing to increase the threshold amount of silence used to decide when words are displayed on a new line. As we do guided meditations, the speech tends to be slower, with "contemplative" or "reflexive" pauses in the middle of sentences. It would be great to have a more "cursive" text display where the sentences flow naturally. For example it currently typically detects text like this:

today
we're going
to bla bla

• optionally (not critical) offering a butt to create a new word which hasn't been properly detected (right now I just add undetected words to the closest word, but then the word boundaries are lost).
• NB: in the Paperedits section, it says "you don't have any transcriptions" instead of "you don't have any paperedits".

In the long run I would say that such a tool which keeps audio and text in sync, with text search capabilities, offers great potential and it could be integrated in various systems such as CMSes. Maybe be this could be released as a plugin? Keep up the good work! 👍

[pietrop]

Thanks for this very interested and detailed feedback, have you tried the paper-editing feature?

I also welcome help/pull request on adding a better search feature, as current one is a bit limited.

[sedubois]

Thanks to you @pietrop for this. As mentioned I tried the paper edits but it did not suit the needs. The Transcriptions > Edit tab is much closer to what is needed. Just being able to skip or add some words + allow to add punctuation to structure sentences and paragraphs would be great.

I really have no time to contribute PRs unfortunately so I just try to use the tool then patch up the resulting raw text export in a separate text editor.

[pietrop]

Thinking of integrating part of the Fact2 Transcription editor I've worked on, with the text editing feature of autoEdit.

[pietrop]

could also address #41 # Finer grained playback speed control 

[pietrop]

re-more advanced text editing of transcriptions thought this other project I am working on could be of interest @sedubois https://github.com/bbc/react-transcript-editor
demo: https://bbc.github.io/react-transcript-editor/ (click load demo - double click on word for interactivity)