A Web Application for Automated Dialect Analysis

Abstract

Sociolinguists are regularly faced with the task of measuring phonetic features from speech, which involves manually transcribing audio recordings ‐ a major bottleneck to analyzing large collections of data. We harness automatic speech recognition to build an online end-to-end web application where users upload untranscribed speech collections and receive formant measurements of the vowels in their data. We demonstrate this tool by using it to automatically analyze President Barack Obama’s vowel pronunciations.