Other stuff

Few recordings of human speech are recorded “perfectly” — that is to say, inside an acoustically treated studio, with a high-quality microphone, and without external noise or interference. Most are recorded imperfectly, with varying degrees of background noise and unwanted sound. Maybe there’s an air conditioner in the background or line-level fuzz. This is known as room tone, and when it comes to editing audio, dealing with room tone can be challenging and costly, requiring the use of dedicated plugins and software.

Descript’s Overdub technology allows anyone to create a text to speech version of their own voice by providing about ten minutes of recorded audio. We don’t allow people to clone voices other than their own, both via our terms of use, and the voice identification protocol we have built into our training data collection process.

This post continues our series on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the foundational technology that powers Descript’s super-fast transcription.

Anyone in audio or video production has experienced the frustration of reviewing tape and finding just the right sound bite for a story… if only the speaker hadn’t flubbed some words or forgotten to mention something crucial at the right time. Sometimes the only choice is to go through the effort of re-recording or leaving out the almost-perfect sound bite altogether.