AI in Aalto
Learn how Aalto University provides internal productized AI services to staff and students.
Speech-to-Text
Speech-to-Text is an AI-powered automated transcription service based on Whisper, running on Aalto’s data centre using local servers. It supports multiple file formats and languages. The service is for the Aalto community.
Access
You can access the service here
Features
Speech-to-Text provides the ability to make transcriptions of audio from a wide variety of audio/video files. The system consists of a web server and a transcription service. The web server provides an API and endpoints to connect to the transcription service, which utilises WhisperX for transcription. The system uses Celery for job submission management, which communicates with the rest of the system through HTTPS requests, secured by an API key. The transcribed job files (video and audio) are stored and downloadable from the network file system.
The system accepts files in sound-based formats, such as mp3, m4a, wav, and wav. The current output file types are text-based, such as json, srt, aalto (generate a srt file but in 3 languages English, Swedish, and Finnish), and text_only.
The service offers a wide range of languages: English, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
Coverage
The service is available within the Aalto network. For usage outside of Aalto network, please establish a remote connection to an Aalto network. The service is free of charge.
Target groups
The main target audiences for Speech-to-Text are Aalto-affiliated, such as students, teachers, researchers, and employees.
Use cases
Speech-to-Text is a system which is used to make transcription of audio from speech in videos or audio files to text. It is suitable for everyday academic activities such as learning, teaching, and research. It is ideal for transcribing lecture recordings, meeting notes, interviews, and other personal uses. It provides a safe transcription service for Aalto personnel (students, teachers, researchers, etc.) since data stays inside Aalto. Users are allowed to transcribe data up to the confidential level according to Aalto’s data classification. Personal data can be processed but not special categories, such as ethnicity, biometrics, and religion.
Restrictions
The use of the Speech-to-Text for commercial purposes is prohibited. Access rights are limited to Aalto network only.
How to start using the service
To use the service, login to the service using your Aalto account. In the main page, you can drop your audio file into the drop box, configurate your job description (name, language, number of speakers, and output format). After the job is submitted, it will be placed in the job list on the Current job section, where it will be processed and returned when the output is ready. Finally, you can download the output to your local storage when it is ready.
Support
If you have any questions, reach out to the IT Service Desk at servicedesk@aalto.fi.
More information
IT Service Desk
Contact IT End User Support for help or information on Aalto University IT. You can visit the service desk during opening hours or ask for help by email, telephone or chat.