Edit Message

Re: How to get many more contributions

>>Would this sort of system be useful for a low quality sub-project or side project?

>very interesting ... I have not looked at this for a while, are there free gateway facilities to dial (from PSTN) into an Asterisk box?

I have some open source friendly business contacts running asterisk systems. I might be able to borrow a slot or two on someone's T1 PRI.

>>Would this sort of system be useful for a low quality sub-project or side project?

>I think it would be.  Any transcribed audio is useful (though higher sampling rate/bits per sample gives us much more flexibility - because we can downsample the audio to more than one target market).

>The VoxForge UserSubmission API (currently a work in progress) would be useful in this regard.  

>What would your high level view be at the server/network level?

We can obviously get as complicated as we need in the future, but for a starter system I was thinking we hard code the prompts (either text to speech using festival or manually recorded - text to speech is probably easier) to avoid any sort of prompting API.

 The prompt flow would be simple: accept audio followed by a # sign, play back the prompt, ask if it's OK, if yes then continue to next prompt, if no, replay prompt and repeat audio recording. Some of those prompts are rather long. We might want to break them up into shorter segments since people will be trying to remember them on the spot. Or else we might require people to be looking at the web site while they record prompts in which case we won't need to play the prompts for the user and everything can be assigned a numeric code or something.

When the user is finished recording prompts the asterisk server tgz's them up and submits them via HTTP POST in exactly the same way we do it now.

Difficulties come from all of the meta data we currently require allowing with the audio:

LICENSE file can be a canned catch all file assigning copyright to you or me or the FSF or something. (obviously we'll need to play a disclaimer stating this before we allow the user to begin recording, but that's not a problem.)

prompts file is a no brainer.

README file is where it gets fuzzy. We can either require the user to log into the IVR with some sort of numeric username and/or PIN, then we can pull the README data from their WWW account (requires modification to voxforge site), or we can do away with the README file altogether, or we could prompt for the values of the README file and store the meta data as audio and transcribe it later or leave it as-is.

How does all that sound? 

--- (Edited on 4/ 4/2007 9:02 am [GMT-0500] by trevarthan) ---