A web-app (and Chrome packaged app) for recording and annotating speech. Aikuma-ng is intended is intended to help people record and translate speech, by means of making additional audio recordings and/or producing written annotations.
Aikuma-ng differs from the Aikuma native Android mobile app in that Aikuma-ng is based on web technologies. The -ng suffix can be interpreted as 'next-generation' or Angular. Aikuma-ng is intended to be the successor to the Aikuma Android app with a responsive UI to target platforms from desktop to tablet and mobile.
Current status: Beta. App records and imports audio files. Allows the user to respeak or translate by making additional recordings. The user may annotate the the source recording, using respeaking and translation audio if available. The user may export the annotations as a basic WebVTT file, e.g. supported by YouTube. A mobile-capable version is further away than a working desktop version, so those looking for a mobile solution should continue to use Aikuma.
Aikuma-ng design goals are:
- Intuitively easy-to-use by anyone without specialist linguistic training
- Use of web technologies; cross-platform, sustainable
- Installable as a local 'app' via Chrome Packaged App
- Based on Material Design to accomodate touch-screen devices, tablets and eventually mobile phones
- Focus on sharing content to social platforms, e.g. exporting captions for YouTube
Aikuma-ng allows users to import audio files or record new audio files. Work is organised into sessions, each of which represents a primary recording and a set of descriptive metadata.
Users may either annotate source files directly or they may first 'respeak' and/or translate. In this way, a native speaker (perhaps an elder) would be able to make a source recording more suitable for transcription, or may translate, while someone else (perhaps a younger person)could use the annotation editor to produce a set of annotations.
The respeak and translate interface are very easy-to-use, operated by toggling between playback and record with the left and right shift keys. Seeking or fast-forwarding into a lengthy recording is also supported. Work is automatically saved so that users may continue working on a long source recording when time permits.
Aikuma-ng is part of the Aikuma project, an international research and development effort to design and build tools for collaborative language documentation. Our tools may be of use to linguists undertaking language documentation, particularly those wishing to scale up their efforts to incorporate collaboration or crowdsourcing. However a major goal of the Aikuma project is to develop a new class of socially-connected tool language activities interested in documenting, preserving and/or revitalising their own language.
Aikuma-ng would not be possible without the wealth of high quality open source projects upon which it depends:
- AngularJS
- Angular Material
- UnderscoreJS
- ZipJS
- RecorderJS
- WavesurferJS (copyright: CC3.0 BY)
- PapaParse, Angular-indexedDB, Angular-resizable, Angular-route, Angular-translate, Ng-prettyjson, Keypress, Any-resize-event