noScribe

Cutting Edge AI Technology for Automated Audio Transcription

</br>

[!NOTE]

🚀 The new official website for noScribe: https://noscribe.de

Learn how to install and use the software, and find tips to improve transcription quality.

🌐 Available in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.

Please update your links.

---

[!WARNING] Somebody has registered the domain noscribe(dot)ai to sell transcription services. Stay away from this platform, I have nothing to do with it. The real noScribe is free and always will be. This is obviously an attempt to profit from the popularity of my software and the reputation it gained over the years. Very sad.

What is noScribe?

• An app to produce high quality transcripts of interviews for qualitative social research or journalistic use
• noScribe is free and open source (GPL-3.0), available for Windows, MacOS and Linux
• It runs completely locally on your computer, protecting the confidentiality of your interviews. No cloud, no worries
• It can distinguish between different speakers and understands around 60 languages (more or less, see below)
• It includes a nice editor to review, verify and correct the resulting transcript
• It is standing on the shoulders of giants: Whisper from OpenAI, faster-whisper by Guillaume Klein and pyannote from Hervé Bredin

</br>

(The transcript is from this interview which I did in May 2022 with the Russian sociologist Natalia Savelyeva.)

Limitations

• The download is quite large (several gigabytes) due to the included AI models.
• Beware that a one hour interview can take up to three hours to transcribe, depending on your machine.
• Poor audio and background noise will lead to poor transcription results.
• No automatic transcription is perfect, there will always be some manual revision necessary. Use the included Editor to check your transcripts thoroughly. (See also "Factors Influencing the Quality" and "Known Issues" below.)

If you want to know more and can understand German, Rebecca Schmidt from the University of Paderborn wrote a nice review of noScribe, also discussing its limitations. Also the German computer magazine c't recommended noScribe in a recent review.

Why the Name "noScribe"?

The urban dictionary defines scribe as "a person whose entire miserable existence has been reduced to academic grunge and pain". I hope this software will make your academic life a little less painful and grungy, hence the name noScribe :)

About Me

Kai Dröge, PhD in sociology (with a background in computer science), qualitative researcher and teacher, Lucerne University for Applied Science (Switzerland) and Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt/M. (Germany).

Donate

NoScribe is free and always will be. However, developing it costs real money. I have purchased hardware for testing and pay Apple annually for a developer ID. If you would like to support this project, you can make a donation on Ko-Fi. Thanks!

Download and Installation

Current Version Number: 0.7 (see changelog)

All releases are hosted on SWITCHdrive, a secure data sharing platform for Swiss universities.

Windows

<details> <summary>Click to expand</summary>

• Download:
  • The general purpose version for normal PCs without an NVIDIA graphics card: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j?path=%2FnoScribe%20vers.%200.7%2FWindows%2Fnormal
  • A special version using CUDA acceleration on NVIDIA graphics cards with at least 6 GB of VRAM: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j?path=%2FnoScribe%20vers.%200.7%2FWindows%2Fcuda. Make sure that your NVIDIA drivers are on version 570.65 or higher. You must also install the CUDA toolkit from here (a reboot is required afterwards).
• Installation:
  • Start the downloaded setup file. This may take a while, be patient.
  • If you get a warning that "Windows protected your PC" and the app comes from an "Unknown publisher", you have to trust us and click "Run anyway"
  • To do a silent install on a larger group of computers, start the setup with the argument /S.
• Known Issues:
  • It seems that the RTX/GTX 1XXX generation of cards is no longer supported in CUDA. Use the normal version instead.
  • If you receive the following error message: "Transcription worker exited unexpectedly (code 3221226505)," try forcing the use of the CPU for transcription instead of the graphics card. This method is slower but more reliable. To do so, follow these steps: Close noScribe. Open the file C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\noScribe\noScribe\config.yml in a text editor. Change the value for force_whisper_cpu to 'True'. Don't forget the quotation marks around 'True'. Now, restart NoScribe.

</details>

MacOS

<details> <summary>Click to expand</summary>

ported by gernophil </br>

• Newer Macs with Apple Silicon M1-M4 processors and macOS 14 or newer

  • Download: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j?path=%2FnoScribe%20vers.%200.7%2FmacOS%2FApple%20Silicon
  • Double-click on the downloaded dmg-file, then drag noScribe and noScribeEdit into the link to your applications folder (labeled "drag both here to install").
  • You will need Apple's Rosetta2 Intel emulator since one component (ffmpeg) is still made for Intel CPUs. If you don't have it installed already, do this as follows:
    • Open the Terminal (located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).
    • Type softwareupdate --install-rosetta or softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license.
    • Hit enter and follow the instructions on the screen.
  • Start noScribe and/or noScribeEdit by double-clicking the app within your applications.

• Older Macs with Intel processors

  • Note: Version 0.7 is currently not available for Intel based Macs due to incompatibilities with the newest pyannote release. You can, however, use version 0.6: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/apps/files/?dir=/noScribe/noScribe%20releases/noScribe%20vers.%200.6/macOS/x86_64%20(Intel)&fileid=8266174681.
  • Older versions may be available here: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j
  • Unfortunately, we are not able to sign the x86_64 package correctly, so you will get a warning that noScribe and noScribeEdit are from unregistered developers. You have to manually allow noScribe and noScribeEdit to be executed, if your Gatekeeper is active. Follow these steps:
  • Double-click the downloaded dmg-file.
  • Drag noScribe and noScribeEdit into the link to your applications folder (labeled "drag both here to install").
  • Start noScribe by double-clicking the app within your applications folder. You will get an error that noScribe is from an unregistered developer. Do the same with the noScribe Editor.
  • Go to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Scroll down until you see a message stating noScribe was prevented from starting and click "open anyway". Again, do the same with the noScribe Editor.
  • From now on, both programs should start without issues.

</details>

Linux

<details> <summary>Click to expand</summary>

ported by Eckhard Kadasch and Florian Dobener; executable generated by gernophil.

Executable Installation

• Download the CUDA or CPU version of noScribe 0.7 for Linux here: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j?path=%2FnoScribe%20vers.%200.7%2FLinux
  • Issues with noScribe 0.7 for Linux on some systems have been reported. If noScribe 0.7 for Linux does not work on your system, please use noScribe 0.6.2 while we try to solve these issues: https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/EIVup04qkSHb54j?path=%2FnoScribe%20vers.%200.6%2FLinux
• Untar the file using the terminal command tar -xzvf noScribe_0.7.0_cpu_linux_amd64.tar.gz or tar -xzvf noScribe_0.7.0_cuda_linux_amd64.tar.gz.
• Execute noScribe using the terminal by cding into the noScribe folder and executing ./noScribe.
• Optionally: Edit the files noScribe.desktop and noScribeEdit.desktop with a text editor and enter the complete path in the lines starting with Exec= and Icon=.

Manual Installation From Source

See this discussion for