I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.
As you’re well aware but HN folks may not be, it’s not just that it’s noisy, it’s heavily coded, contextually bankrupt speech between multiple parties that spend all day in contact with each other. Dispatchers in particular seem to have superhuman ability to extract information from completely unintelligible garbage.
This is a very accurate description of the problem space. Every municipality has their own jargon, vernacular, and ways to communicate brevity which is key in public safety communications. The communications are often digitized over vocoders that are less than optimal, and then you have the process of recovering voice from noisy communcations channels.
Indeed. The only reason I know is that I tried a few years back and realized that I was asking the computer to do something that I couldn't even do. Anyone that doubts it, just listen to the NYPD feed and try to transcribe for just a minute or two.
(edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days. Would love to have a comment/live chat option if your backlog is getting bare :))