First of all, this blog post is about a somewhat specific problem. Despite this, I think it is quite useful to most readers looking for some Linux knowledge as the tools I used are very general. Let's start with the explanation of
Sometimes I have good ideas when I'm outside. Sometimes I really wanna preserve these ideas, but it's very inconvenient to use phone keyboards, especially on the move. One solution is recording my voice. But then, I would want to transfer those recordings to my computer for future reference. But what if I also want to read the text version of those voice recordings? Let's handle these problems one at a time.
Syncthing is an open source cross-platform program that can sync folders
accross multiple devices. It's perfect for this problem, as it allows for
P2P syncing (for example from a phone to a computer).
It's very easy to set up aswell, you download it on both devices, open a
browser (Synthing has a web frontend) tab on 127.0.0.1:8384 and scan the ID
QR with your phones camera. Then share whatever is the folder that has your
audio recordings.
If your init system is systemd, to start synthing (and enable autostart
at boot) you can run (where USER is your linux user):
systemctl enable syncthing@USER.service --now
Synthing has configuration options for encryption and file filtering.
If you want more robust syncing, you could also host a Syncthing instance
on a server.
To convert my speech to text I use the SpeechRecognition python package:
pip install SpeechRecognition
It supports many speech recognition options, including offline ones.
It's also really easy to use, check
my script.
Options (present in my script as comments):
pip install pocketsphinx
There are also other online and offline options. (SpeechRecognition documentation)
I use vimwiki vimwiki (a (neo)vim plugin) that makes managing markdown files in a wiki-like manner extremely easy. Vimwiki also has a diary option. To store the recording path and text in my notes, I wrote a few scripts.
The speech-to-diary.sh script calls the speech recognition script
on a selected file, appends transcription to a vimwiki diary and
(optionally) moves the voice recording to the vimwiki folder.
it has a bunch of flags, you can get a help message by running:
./speech-to-diary.sh -h
The text that it puts looks like this:
20220328_162342.m4a 16:24:05
I have a vim shortcut that plays an audio file under the cursor so that
I can also listen to it if the transcription is not accurate enough.
Whatever speech recognition returned
/home/tea/vimwiki/diary/resources/20220328_162342.wav
If you don't use vim or vimwiki, you can just change the last line of the script to save the text to a file of your choosing.
Now, we need a way to react to new files appearing in the syncing
directory. For that, we can use the linux inotify interface, that
waits for changes in files. For syncthing, the following command
works:
inotifywait -c -r -m -e attrib $PATH_TO_WATCH
You can also see it used in a script. Be sure to read the readme
on the repo for some additional information on setting up
a systemd service (if you don't know how).
Now, if you autostart syncthing and the watchscript at system boot, it will process all new audio files.