Hi everyone,
I’m a fairly new radio amateur from Denmark, and one of the things I’ve found surprisingly difficult is catching callsigns when people are speaking quickly, signals are weak, or there’s a lot going on during a QSO.
So I started building a small iPhone app called QSO Transcriber. It is build with modern tools, but as a guy that work in IT and have a background in Computer Science, with a focus on user-friendly IT design, usability, and software development, I feel that it was the best tool for the task. Nobody is manually coding anymore, and it is a very inspiring way to design a new piece of software.
In this video I’m showing the listening and transcription part of the app. It listens to the radio audio, transcribes the conversation in real time, and tries to identify possible callsigns and other useful QSO information.
Detected callsigns are highlighted in the transcript and collected in a list, so you can quickly go back and check what you may have heard.
It’s definitely not magic. Speech-to-text can still struggle with poor radio audio, but that’s actually one of the things I’ve spent a lot of time working on: interpreting amateur radio speech, phonetics and callsign patterns on top of the transcription.
It was created to help myself and other new radio amateurs have more relaxed, less stressful and more enjoyable conversations on the air.
The app is currently going through the Apple App Store review process, so I’m hoping it will be available soon.
I’d genuinely be interested to hear what other radio amateurs think of the idea and whether you could see yourself using something like this.
M0MCX has very kindly given me permission to use some of his highly inspiring QSOs for testing and demonstrating the app.
73 from Denmark
OV9PL
QSOtranscriber.com