Split speech audio file on words in python

Question

I feel like this is a fairly common problem but I haven't yet found a suitable answer. I have many audio files of human speech that I would like to break on words, which can be done heuristically by looking at pauses in the waveform, but can anyone point me to a function/library in python that does this automatically?

Answer 1

An easier way to do this is using pydub module. recent addition of silent utilities does all the heavy lifting such as setting up silence threahold , setting up silence length. etc and simplifies code significantly as opposed to other methods mentioned.

Here is an demo implementation , inspiration from here

Setup:

I had a audio file with spoken english letters from A to Z in the file "a-z.wav". A sub-directory splitAudio was created in the current working directory. Upon executing the demo code, the files were split onto 26 separate files with each audio file storing each syllable.

Observations: Some of the syllables were cut off, possibly needing modification of following parameters,
min_silence_len=500
silence_thresh=-16

One may want to tune these to one's own requirement.

Demo Code:

from pydub import AudioSegment
from pydub.silence import split_on_silence

sound_file = AudioSegment.from_wav("a-z.wav")
audio_chunks = split_on_silence(sound_file, 
    # must be silent for at least half a second
    min_silence_len=500,

    # consider it silent if quieter than -16 dBFS
    silence_thresh=-16
)

for i, chunk in enumerate(audio_chunks):

    out_file = ".//splitAudio//chunk{0}.wav".format(i)
    print "exporting", out_file
    chunk.export(out_file, format="wav")

Output:

Python 2.7.9 (default, Dec 10 2014, 12:24:55) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>> ================================ RESTART ================================
>>> 
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk0.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk1.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk2.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk3.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk4.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk5.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk6.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk7.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk8.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk9.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk10.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk11.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk12.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk13.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk14.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk15.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk16.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk17.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk18.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk19.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk20.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk21.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk22.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk23.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk24.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk25.wav
exporting .//splitAudio//chunk26.wav
>>> 

Answer 2

You could look at Audiolab It provides a decent API to convert the voice samples into numpy arrays. The Audiolab module uses the libsndfile C++ library to do the heavy lifting.

You can then parse the arrays to find the lower values to find the pauses.

Answer 3

Use IBM STT. Using timestamps=true you will get the word break up along with when the system detects them to have been spoken.

There are a lot of other cool features like word_alternatives_threshold to get other possibilities of words and word_confidence to get the confidence with which the system predicts the word. Set word_alternatives_threshold to between (0.1 and 0.01) to get a real idea.

This needs sign on, following which you can use the username and password generated.

The IBM STT is already a part of the speechrecognition module mentioned, but to get the word timestamp, you will need to modify the function.

An extracted and modified form looks like:

def extracted_from_sr_recognize_ibm(audio_data, username=IBM_USERNAME, password=IBM_PASSWORD, language="en-US", show_all=False, timestamps=False,
                                word_confidence=False, word_alternatives_threshold=0.1):
    assert isinstance(username, str), "``username`` must be a string"
    assert isinstance(password, str), "``password`` must be a string"

    flac_data = audio_data.get_flac_data(
        convert_rate=None if audio_data.sample_rate >= 16000 else 16000,  # audio samples should be at least 16 kHz
        convert_width=None if audio_data.sample_width >= 2 else 2  # audio samples should be at least 16-bit
    )
    url = "https://stream-fra.watsonplatform.net/speech-to-text/api/v1/recognize?{}".format(urlencode({
        "profanity_filter": "false",
        "continuous": "true",
        "model": "{}_BroadbandModel".format(language),
        "timestamps": "{}".format(str(timestamps).lower()),
        "word_confidence": "{}".format(str(word_confidence).lower()),
        "word_alternatives_threshold": "{}".format(word_alternatives_threshold)
    }))
    request = Request(url, data=flac_data, headers={
        "Content-Type": "audio/x-flac",
        "X-Watson-Learning-Opt-Out": "true",  # prevent requests from being logged, for improved privacy
    })
    authorization_value = base64.standard_b64encode("{}:{}".format(username, password).encode("utf-8")).decode("utf-8")
    request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic {}".format(authorization_value))

    try:
        response = urlopen(request, timeout=None)
    except HTTPError as e:
        raise sr.RequestError("recognition request failed: {}".format(e.reason))
    except URLError as e:
        raise sr.RequestError("recognition connection failed: {}".format(e.reason))
    response_text = response.read().decode("utf-8")
    result = json.loads(response_text)

    # return results
    if show_all: return result
    if "results" not in result or len(result["results"]) < 1 or "alternatives" not in result["results"][0]:
        raise Exception("Unknown Value Exception")

    transcription = []
    for utterance in result["results"]:
        if "alternatives" not in utterance:
            raise Exception("Unknown Value Exception. No Alternatives returned")
        for hypothesis in utterance["alternatives"]:
            if "transcript" in hypothesis:
                transcription.append(hypothesis["transcript"])
    return "\n".join(transcription)

Answer 4

pyAudioAnalysis can segment an audio file if the words are clearly separated (this is rarely the case in natural speech). The package is relatively easy to use:

python pyAudioAnalysis/pyAudioAnalysis/audioAnalysis.py silenceRemoval -i SPEECH_AUDIO_FILE_TO_SPLIT.mp3 --smoothing 1.0 --weight 0.3

More details on my blog.