Correct text/audio alignment errors | Voters

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Correct text/audio alignment errors

Ben Woodward

If the auto-transcription fails to detect a string of words in the audio, you can edit the transcript and add them in. The software will make a judgement about which waveforms to align these words to. However, if the software makes an incorrect assessment it is currently not possible to manually adjust the word positioning.

September 12, 2019

Andrew Mason

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Joel

Editing videos in Portuguese, I have this problem with almost every sentence. I can't really just edit the transcript without also manually correcting the in point, since it usually clips off half the following word.

Toggle Rat

This is definitely still a problem. Being able to select text and align a group of words would be nice.

Rick Maranta

This is still a big problem. I find it almost impossible at times to put the correct audio on a part of the waveform. Super frustrating.

Yannick Vez

Rick Maranta: I wanted to kill myself three times because of this shit, so frustrating

Jason Dinkel

Yannick Vez: Helps to use both a mouse and a touch pad. You can use a pinch action to make the waveform wider quickly and use the mouse with ctrl/cmd to grab the edges.

Would certainly be nice if there was a more fluid way of moving the words on the waveform around and expanding/contracting them as grouped text rather than one word at a time when Descript aligns them really poorly.

Jason Dinkel

Can we merge this with my thoughts here: https://feedback.descript.com/feature-requests/p/pin-or-lock-words-to-wave-form

Yannick Vez

Jason Dinkel: Thanks, I'll try it.

daytona

How about a word/word group slide function? In stead of adjusting the in/out of a word, just slide it along the timeline to where is goes!

Yannick Vez

daytona: YES YES I want this!

Jay Mutzafi

How is this not solved yet? I have a clip where it failed completely to detect words, and if i add them manually, it adds it on a "separate" track, and I have found no way to align it with the audio whatsoever.

Jason Dinkel

Jay Mutzafi: Looks like this topic is under review, so that's good. I've been working around alignment problems by using the blade tool and then typing text and isolating it with a blade cut on both sides. This allows me to "pin" a phrase where I want it, even if the audio is silent such as with a silent video where I want to add an overdub. So, we can technically do this without any modifications to the tool, but I think for the casual users of this tool, it's beyond their ability. So this will be nice to see how the Descript team decides to implement this.

Rick Maranta

Yes. Just had this issue. The first half of a sentence failed to have words and it was impossible to add them in. Even aligning the words with the text is a pain having to drag both ends to the right spot. Verfy fiddly and frustrating. I had to clip to a new composition. Took me a long time. Should be also be able to re-transcribe a selection or clip.

Harry Hawk

Related to this I put in a request to support a 2nd pass on the AI transcription to find gaps.
Specifically, if you (like me) are using a manually supplied "human" transcript there are often gaps where non-word filler sounds appear (ummm), etc. 
Since it's clear from the timeline that Descript knows where they are (they are colored black vs. pink).
Descript fire off a 2nd pass AI transcription that could use those time codes to instruct the AI transcription to only transcribe those "black" sections. 
https://feedback.descript.com/feature-requests/p/human-ai-transcripts

Yoz Grahame

I think this feature has now been added: https://help.descript.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054482811

Russell Silber

Yoz Grahame: They did and it's a great start, but if there are large blocks of unaligned text it is labor intensive to fix in the current implementation. I think there needs to also be a way to move/slide the word tabs, not just trim them at the edges, and then importantly, select multiple word tabs to move/slide in a batch. Right now when I have to manually fix 30-40 word tabs that all bunched up for some reason it is not fun.

Alastair Budge

Russell Silber: definitely agree with this. In my experience (now editing 100+ podcasts with Descript) the errors with alignment are almost always multiple sentences, not individual words. So fixing the alignment takes a huge amount of time, and it's actually easier to edit the timestamps in the exported VTT files.

Russell Silber

Alastair Budge: that’s a great tip, I’ll play around with that as a workaround.

Toggle Rat

Yoz Grahame: I didn't know this was a thing. Thanks!

Mark Bramhill

Been a fan of Descript since the alphas, and this is one of the biggest gaps that's still in the app. Sure it's annoying when there are errors, but as long as there's a way to fix them it's just a mild annoyance. When there's nothing I can do to fix things, it's maddening.

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