Xtrans: A Speech Annotation And Transcription Tool

We present XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription application designed and developed by Linguistic Data Consortium. XTrans provides new and efficient solutions to many common challenges encountered during the manual transcription process of a wide variety of audio genres, such as supporting multiple audio channels in a meeting recording or right-to-left text directionality for languages like Arabic. To facilitate accurate transcription, XTrans incorporates a number of quality control functions, and provides a user-friendly mechanism for transcribing overlapping speech. This paper will describe the motivation to develop a new transcription tool, and will give an overview of XTrans functionality.