Forum Replies Created
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I am sorry for the delay in responding to your posts.
Ward: thank you for sending those links to the conversations from the Jana Yahoo group.
Blake: I think that the work I have done annotating the talks Culadasa are quite uneven, some are very brief and some are very detailed, but include my particular paraphrasing of what Culadasa said. I will try to generate an Excel type spreadsheet which will have the name of the file, as I have renamed it according to the convention that I may have explained earlier and in the next column the annotations related to that MP3 file name. Without too much difficulty I believe I could go through the website, and discover the file name of the MP3 file as it presently exists or is referenced to on the website, when one asks to download the file. There may be easier ways of accomplishing this task of linking the annotations to the files that exist on the dharma treasure website. That is above my pay grade.
Another project I would like to work on is to restore the linking that is on the webpage to the MP3 files that exist in the cloud but when one tries to listen or download them only brings up a unworkable link path. This problem applies to the discourses from September 2010 to March of 2011. Then I would be able to listen to those discourses and annotate them as well.
regarding the program Dragon speak, I have version 11 premium, which I have trained by going through the one-hour or so testing of the microphone and reading some predetermined text for the program to get a beginning start on how one speaks, and then I have used it on and off, less than I had intended since I was not writing as much as my fantasies of writing had misled me to believe. I have trained this program with two different microphones but I also have a portable recorder that has sufficient sound quality to work with this program. The program is always improving in its transcription of what I say since it learns from the mistakes that are made besides which it includes some easy means to correct misspellings or wrong words by simply saying the words correct that, which brings up a list of 10 choices which sound the same. With continued use of the program, its recognition of one’s speech improves. By the use of spelling, I was able to enter Culadasa’s name just once and the program was able to recognize Culadasa’s name after that. The program maintains a correlation between the sound file and the words that have been transcribed so that they can be corrected at later date using voice commands. I think it would be impossible to train it just by importing an audio file. But I do think it would be quite possible to to have Culadasa train the program and then send me a copy of his user profile files which then I could use to further train the program to more accurately transcribe the existing MP3 files. No success is guaranteed as we are all aware of. With regard to its accuracy you be the judge since I have dictated this posting using this program and made very few corrections, leaving most of the errors for you to see. With regard to the specialized vocabulary of the Buddha Dharma I believe that just spelling the correct words initially would be sufficient for the program to recognize them later. In dictating this posting I have only spelled out to words, which did not include Buddha Dharma, that came out without any training of the program.
Alex K: could you please send me the link to the wiki project. Thank you.
Alex M: it sounds like you and Alex K have much more programming or software knowledge than I do, and I would be grateful for any suggestions to remedy any errors in my thinking about how I may help put this indexing of his discourses and other source documents and videos to make specific topics more easily query able. Adding the start times to specific topics within a single audio or video file would require someone to go through noting the times when that topic began, and adding that information to the wiki link or the annotation page of the wiki link. You see I’m already out of my depth. With regard to having the wiki page or whatever it will be called incorporated into Dharma treasure or being independent from the Dharma treasure website would also necessitate making a decision of whether or not at this stage we are trying to simply index for easy access to Culadasa’s various discourses and topics discussed, or are we trying to make a general page to index topics in the Buddha Dharma and how various teachers have talked about these topics, which I think would be a much bigger project, and would involve some degree of cooperation with the students of other teachers, in the hopes of a fruitful outcome of inter-pollination. I have dictated this entire posting and it is taken me slightly more than one hour, most of which I spent in thinking about what I wanted to say. Thank you for all your help and your interest in promoting further dissemination of the very valuable practical meditation advice, and very interesting ontological and epistemological theories/interpretations of the Buddha Dharma as discussed by Culadasa. Be well
