IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) Transcription with Tensorflow

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm looking into designing a software platform that will aid linguists and anthropologists in their study of previously unstudied languages. Statistics show that around 1,000 languages exist that have never been studied by a person outside of their respective speaker groups.

My goal is to utilize TensorFlow to make a platform that will allow linguists to study and document these languages more efficiently, and to help them create written systems for the ones that don't have a written system already. One of their current methods of accomplishing such a task is three-fold: 1) Record a native speaker conversing in the language, 2) Listening to that recording and trying to transcribe it into the IPA, 3) From the phonetics, analyzing the phonemics and phonotactics of the language to eventually create a written system for the speaker.

My proposed platform would cut that research time down from a minimum of a year to a maximum of six months. Before I start, I have some questions...

What would be required to train TensorFlow to transcribe live audio into the IPA? Has this already been done? and if so, how would I utilize a previous solution for this project? Is a project like this even possible with TensorFlow? if not, what would you recommend using instead?

My apologies for the magnitude of this question. I don't have much experience in the realm of machine learning, as I am just beginning the research process for this project. Any help is appreciated!