aTrain

aTrain is a tool for automatically transcribing speech recordings utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models without uploading any data. It was developed by researchers at the Business Analytics and Data Science-Center at the University of Graz and tested by researchers from the Know-Center Graz. 

A paper introducing aTrain has been published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance: Take the aTrain. Introducing an Interface for the Accessible Transcription of Interviews.

The software can be installed via the Microsoft app store: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/atrain/9N15Q44SZNS2

Alternative installation methods can also be found on our Download-Page.

aTrain offers the following benefits:

Fast and accurate
aTrain provides a user friendly access to the faster-whisper implementation of OpenAI’s Whisper model, ensuring best in class transcription quality (see Wollin-Geiring et al. 2023) paired with higher speeds on your local computer. Transcription when selecting the highest-quality model takes only around three times the audio length on current mobile CPUs typically found in middle-class business notebooks (e.g., Core i5 12th Gen, Ryzen Series 6000).

Speaker detection
aTrain has a speaker detection mode based on pyannote.audio and can analyze each text segment to determine which speaker it belongs to.

Privacy Preservation and GDPR compliance
aTrain processes the provided speech recordings completely offline on your own device and does not send recordings or transcriptions to the internet. This helps researchers to maintain data privacy requirements arising from ethical guidelines or to comply with legal requirements such as the GDRP.

Multi-language support
aTrain can process speech recordings in any of the following 57 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti compatible output
aTrain provides transcription files that are seamlessly importable into the most popular tools for qualitative analysis, ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA. This allows you to directly play audio for the corresponding text segment by clicking on its timestamp.

Nvidia GPU support
aTrain can either run on the CPU or an NVIDIA GPU (CUDA toolkit installation required). A CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPU significantly improves the speed of transcriptions and speaker detection, reducing transcription time to 20% of audio length on current entry-level gaming notebooks.