Voxseg-ELAN 0.1.1

Voxseg-ELAN integrates the voice activity detection methods offered by Voxseg (Wilkinson & Niesler 2021) into ELAN, allowing users to apply voice activity detection to multimedia sources linked to ELAN transcripts directly from within ELAN's user interface.

Requirements and installation

Voxseg-ELAN makes use of several of other open-source applications and utilities:

• ELAN (tested with ELAN 6.3 and 6.4 under macOS 12.6)
• Python 3 (tested with Python 3.9)
• ffmpeg

Voxseg-ELAN is written in Python 3, and also depends on the following Python packages, all of which should be installed in a virtual environment:

• Voxseg, installed with all of its dependencies. This can be done with pip and a clone of the current Voxseg GitHub repository.
• pydub, installed in the same virtual environment as Voxseg (tested with v0.25.1)
• tensorflow, installed in the same virtual environment as Voxseg and pydub (tested with v2.10.0).

Under macOS 12.6, the following commands can be used to fetch and install the necessary Python packages:

git clone https://github.com/coxchristopher/voxseg-elan
cd voxseg-elan

python3 -m virtualenv venv-voxseg
source venv-voxseg/bin/activate

git clone https://github.com/NickWilkinson37/voxseg.git
pip install ./voxseg
pip install pydub tensorflow

Once all of these tools and packages have been installed, Voxseg-ELAN can be made available to ELAN as follows:

1. Edit the file voxseg-elan.sh to specify (a) the directory in which ffmpeg is located, and (b) a Unicode-friendly language and locale (if en_US.UTF-8 isn't available on your computer).

2. To make Voxseg-ELAN available to ELAN, move your Voxseg-ELAN directory into ELAN's extensions directory. This directory is found in different places under different operating systems:

   • Under macOS, right-click on ELAN_6.4 in your /Applications folder and select "Show Package Contents", then copy your Voxseg-ELAN folder into ELAN_6.4.app/Contents/app/extensions.
   • Under Linux, copy your Voxseg-ELAN folder into ELAN_6-4/app/extensions.
   • Under Windows, copy your Voxseg-ELAN folder into C:\Users\AppData\Local\ELAN_6-4\app\extensions.

Once ELAN is restarted, it will now include 'Voxseg voice activity detection' in the list of Recognizers found under the 'Recognizer' tab in Annotation Mode. The user interface for this recognizer allows users to enter the settings needed to apply voice activity detection to a selected WAV audio recording that hasx been linked to this ELAN transcript. Additional settings (e.g., the speech vs. non-speech threshold, constant adjustments to the start and end-times of recognized speech segments, etc.) can be configured through the recognizer interface, as well.

Once these settings have been entered in Voxseg-ELAN, pressing the Start button will begin applying Voxseg's voice activity detection to the selected audio recording. Once that process is complete, if no errors occurred, ELAN will allow the user to load the resulting tier with the automatically recognized speech segments into the current transcript.

Limitations

This is an alpha release of Voxseg-ELAN, and has only been tested under macOS (12.6) with Python 3.9. No support for Windows or Linux is included in this version.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the authors of the Voxseg Python package, including Nick Wilkinson and Thomas Niesler. Thanks, as well, to Han Sloetjes for his help with issues related to ELAN's local recognizer specifications.

Citing Voxseg-ELAN

If referring to this code in a publication, please consider using the following citation:

Cox, Christopher. 2022. Voxseg-ELAN: Voice activity detection for ELAN users. Version 0.1.1.

    title = {Voxseg-ELAN: Voice activity detection for ELAN users},
    author = {Christopher Cox},
    year = {2022}
    note = {Version 0.1.1},
    }