`moneypenny`

Automatic transcription tool built around the Google Speech-To-Text API. It turns audio/video files into timestamped, .srt-formatted transcripts and has support for speaker separation and automatic punctuation.

Self-Hosting

This service is self-hostable via dokku. It requires the following addons to be present and linked to the app:

In order to create the database tables for this service, open psql via dokku postgres:connect <your_app> and run the instructions in ./src/db/pg/create.sql

After that, you can connect to your container and run yarn add-user --email {an_email} --password {password_will_be_hashed} to add the first user to the service.

You will also have to add the content of nginx.example.conf to /home/dokku/moneypenny/nginx.conf.d/upload.conf to increase nginx's default timeouts since the STT API can take a very long time to process input. This would ideally be circumvented via a queue for async processing. I have not got around to implement that yet.

Setting up Google Cloud

This service uses the Google Cloud Speech-To-Text API to transcribe media files. This API requires you to upload media files to Google Cloud Storage before being able to transcribe them. In order to setup your Google Cloud account, you'll need to:

(env: GOOGLE_PROJECT_ID) Activate the Speech-To-Text API for the Google Cloud project you are using for this service
(env: GOOGLE_BUCKET) Create a private Google Cloud Storage bucket
(env GOOGLE_CLIENT_EMAIL & GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY) Create a service user with at least the following set of permissions:

storage.objects.create
storage.objects.delete
storage.objects.get
storage.objects.list

After setting the credentials as environment variables via dokku config:set (see above and .env.example), you should be able to use the service.

Configuration

See .env.example for required and optional .env variables.

See here for Google setup instructions
UPLOAD_LIMIT_MB sets the upload limit. This value will also have to be reflected in the nginx config (see above)
SESSION_SECRET (required) see here
SENTRY_DSN (optional)

Development

Mocking Google STT responses

Replace recognize() call in transcribe.js with src/lib/__mocks__/googleCloud.js implementation