Spoken Language Processing in Python

Audio files are different from most other types of data. Before you can start working with them, they require some preprocessing. In this chapter, you'll learn the first steps to working with speech files by converting two different audio files into soundwaves and comparing them visually.

Speech recognition is still far from perfect. But the SpeechRecognition library provides an easy way to interact with many speech-to-text APIs. In this section, you'll learn how to use the SpeechRecognition library to easily start converting the spoken language in your audio files to text.

Not all audio files come in the same shape, size or format. Luckily, the PyDub library by James Robert provides tools which you can use to programmatically alter and change different audio file attributes such as frame rate, number of channels, file format and more. In this chapter, you'll learn how to use this helpful library to ensure all of your audio files are in the right shape for transcription.

In this chapter, you'll put everything you've learned together by building a speech processing proof of concept project for a technology company, Acme Studios. You'll start by transcribing customer support call phone call audio snippets to text. Then you'll perform sentiment analysis using NLTK, named entity recognition using spaCy and text classification using scikit-learn on the transcribed text.