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Transcribed police scanners in real-time

213 points by illuminated 6y ago

cddotdotslash 6y ago
I really like this idea - it also has the side effect of making all of these streams easily searchable later on. That being said, transcription still isn't at the point where it can understand radio garble. > because I'm going to take that group that someone over the Willing. Can you raise Lieutenant lady and having semi-open Buddhist month > you know the carrot for you and Hudson no accident Reminds me of the early days of Google Voice voicemail transcription.
- bberenberg 6y ago
  Absolutely agree. I feel like the next step here would be to: * Put the audio clip next to the transcribed text * Flag transcribed text which fails some heuristics * Allows users to suggest edits to the transcription * Train the transcription models on contributed edits + police specific lingo
  - gfosco 6y ago
    Cooperative community editing, genius-style, would be perfect. Big events would lead to incredibly accurate transcripts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wfbarks 6y ago
  "strength tenets we do not have any to 9 available yeah five-year-old advisor. We have several dogs around miracles"
abrichr 6y ago
This is great. Is it open source? I would love to know more about how it works. Where do you get the source data? What is required in order to add more cities? Thanks for sharing!
- yasoob 6y ago
  I would assume that its piping the audio output from a radio receiver to some live transcription API. Would also love to find out how it actually works.
blantonl 6y ago
This is very impressive. I'm the owner of Broadcastify.com, where presumably these streams are being transcribed from. We've dabbled in this space and looked at real-world approaches to taking something like this to market, but transcribing 7000+ streams to text seems like an expensive (computational) and ($$) effort that needs a lot of investigation. Note to mention that the individual lexicons between streams are drastically different. I wonder how the developer has done the integration to our streams... because I never heard from them :)
- robbiet480 6y ago
  Hey Lindsay, I'm the one who just added EBRCS to Calls. Wondering if a solution to both cost problems would be to (optionally) have submitters upload a transcript along with each call? Could build a model into trunk-recorder maybe?
  - blantonl 6y ago
    That might be an option, but we'd have to somehow get trained models down to the client, which is one of the issues. We're working on client ingest models now that work on more of a "tasking" perspective, where someone deploys a device that is GPS enabled and then we send an ingest task to fill in coverage, start new coverage, etc. But this is predicated on low cost ingest devices (read: RPi and RTL sticks) which might not have the horsepower needed for transcription at the client level.
    - johann8384 6y ago
      That would be cool, kind of like GroundStation or SatNOGS
- lunixbochs 6y ago
  I prototyped this concept too, at https://feeds.talonvoice.com https://feeds.talonvoice.com with prohibitively expensive Google speech recognition, but also have a feature for users to listen and fix transcriptions. If murph was anything like me they probably paid for broadcastify and tailed a couple of the static mp3 feeds. My plan was to collect user transcription corrections on my site then train my own inexpensive models on them. The open-source speech tech I work on can do passable transcription at close to 100x faster than realtime on a quad core desktop CPU (or 200 simultaneous streams per 4-core box at 50% activity). With higher quality transcription it's closer to 10-20x faster than realtime. For your case you could also try to push some of the computation down to the uploading machine. These models can run on a raspberry pi. I think the biggest work for a new effort here is going to be building local language models and collecting transcribed audio to train on. However, there have been a couple of incredible advances in the last year for semi-supervised speech recognition learning, where we can probably leverage your 1 year backlog as "unsupervised training data" while only having a small portion of it properly transcribed. The current state-of-the-art paper uses around 100 hours of transcribed audio and 60,000 hours of unlabeled audio, and I bet you could push the 100h requirement down with a good language model and mixing in existing training data from non-radio sources.
lunixbochs 6y ago
I built something similar to this, open-source, here: https://feeds.talonvoice.com https://feeds.talonvoice.com It's not currently streaming any feeds because Google Speech is pretty expensive, but I have the expertise and plan to train my own speech models that would be less expensive to run and more accurate than Google at this task as well. The main difference between this and murph is my `feeds` site has UI for users to listen to the audio and fix/vote on transcriptions, and corrections are propagated quickly to other users.
rachelbythebay 6y ago
Example audio: https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351 https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351 This is close enough to the Seattle feed that you can do a compare & contrast. Heard: "clear my first call ocean nora 470" On the site: "charlie my first call" So, yeah, this still has a long long way to go. I considered and discarded this in 2011 because it was pure insanity, and as another comment suggests, it's highly context-sensitive. "ECR" is El Camino Real. "Vets" is Veterans Blvd. But... "Code 99" is the emergency button... for one department... and it means something else entirely for another, just 20 miles apart. I'd love to have it, but it still seems out of reach.
- elicash 6y ago
  Seems like there could be a lot of use cases where you don't need anything even close to perfection.
- jcims 6y ago
  Your scanner project was a marvel to me at the time. Until a system can train right down to the officer/dispatcher I don't see how this gets beyond 50-60% accurate. I can't even transcribe half the calls, not sure why I should expect a computer to (at this time anyway).
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Like to see a way to play the original audio clip the OCR came from. Sorry, talking about the project this thread is linked to.
pugworthy 6y ago
Some of the text though are pretty weak. I have no idea if this is just garbled transcription, or dreamy cop talk... "movie up and around pain and dreamy I'm not" or "happy person that you can just so may I help you"
- lunixbochs 6y ago
  It's the transcription, I think this kind of site should allow you to fall back to listening to the audio. Even with high accuracy, if there's no human curation, there will be pretty awkward mistakes every once in a while in the text.
atarian 6y ago
Apart from the police and people listening out of interest/curiosity, who else taps into police scanners? It seems like a really narrow and competitive niche to be in for developers.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Local news services.
- robbiet480 6y ago
  According to Broadcastify (https://www.broadcastify.com/ https://www.broadcastify.com/), there's 43k listeners across 7000 streams right now
- lobster45 6y ago
  Criminals
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I hear people say this from time to time, but I don't think I've ever heard anything actually said on a scanner that would be plausibly useful to a criminal.
    - smokelegend 6y ago
      Not true, police communications can be a gold mine of information sometimes. Name, address, date of birth, social security number, identifying features i.e. height, weight, hair color, etc. Don't underestimate how valuable this information can be. Not to mention the movements of police resources and personnel. All said published over the wire, anyone can hear with the right hardware/software.
- blantonl 6y ago
  It is ridiculously competitive in the mobile app store market, because there is a lot of revenue out there. All of the apps source their streams from Broadcastify, and they license Broadcastify's API and content to do so. The apps are enormously popular, and the market generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. I deal constantly with nefarious developers who often feel like Broadcastify has an obligation to grant them a license. We had a terrible dust up this weekend with a developer that was upset we wouldn't grant him a license to develop "yet another police scanner app" and he went on a warpath with me personally. The app store environment is a major pain and exhausting...
mhh__ 6y ago
Is it legal to listen to these in the states? I know OFCOM (UK FCC) state it's illegal to listen to certain frequencies without permission, which seems delightfully unenforceable (for legal reasons I most definitely do not possess a wideband software defined radio or a similarly sensitive antenna)
- jauer 6y ago
  (not a lawyer, if one shows up, listen to them) Generally speaking, you can listen to anything, as long as it's not for commercial gain. The exception to this is mobile phones, because it was trivial to listen to them using children's toy radios. There's apparently some uncertainty around handling of encrypted emergency services communications: https://www.rtdna.org/content/scanners https://www.rtdna.org/content/scanners https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulgence-radio-communications https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...
- ryanwatkins 6y ago
  Yes, it is legal in the US. Federal law allows it - P.R. 91-36 (FCC 93-410), though New York law attempts to make it illegal to do in your car: https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sect-397.html https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sec...
tapmap 6y ago
Would be great to link to the real recording, so you can hear it for yourself.
yellow_postit 6y ago
Neat! Wonder what service they are using for the transcription as some of the results are pretty rough probably from both poor quality audio and a unique lexicon. Custom speech models could probably go a long way here to clean it up and I would bet there’s some public interest in contributing transcriptions for training if the site allowed user submitted corrections. Having this indexed and searchable could be powerful.
starpilot 6y ago
> got another call from the zombie shelter for 24th Avenue got two males waiting inside Oh shit.
stuartaxelowen 6y ago
Very cool! Is this yours, OP? I built a text classifier platform (https://www.taggit.io/ https://www.taggit.io/) and I'd love to explore building something on top of this text stream to notify people of important happenings around the protests in real time.
- illuminated 6y ago
  Not mine, I've got the URL over IM few minutes before posting it here
  - stuartaxelowen 6y ago
    Thanks!
busterarm 6y ago
Which channel though? In each of these cities there are several frequencies...
larrywright 6y ago
This actually would solve one of my use cases that broadcastify itself does not. I don't listen to the scanner often, and often when I do it's in response to hearing sirens or seeing something. By then, the call has already gone out so tuning in to the scanner isn't all that helpful. Having transcripts of recent calls available would be quite useful.
petee 6y ago
Nice but mostly incoherent - "Google Launcher new job and I want to play better third-party colder or does the people from the vegetable okay"
ycombonator 6y ago
Maybe we should “defund the police” and never call 911 when we get burgled, assaulted and murdered. How about we start with Beverly Hills.
flaque 6y ago
I’m so glad someone did this
vondur 6y ago
Our local PD is going to be encrypting their communications soon I believe.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. <operator>: Call was from a neighbor in the area.
- MengYuanLong 6y ago
  I don't have familiarity with speech-to-text but wouldn't it be possible to weight words based on their probability in this application to help resolve this. For example, suspect is probably a low frequency word in normal speech but very high in radio chatter.
  - amluto 6y ago
    This needs care. Imagine if you accidentally trained a model that added racism when none was present in the audio.
    - VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
      Or used a weird model like this one which does some sort of Markov chaining to complete sentences that weren't even present in the original audio or transcription. "foaming at the mouth" was never even close to being uttered on the radio. I'm guessing the (flawed) model inserted that part because of the proximity to the word "needle" and "assistance". Maybe? No idea.. this website it totally fucked.
      - optimumsuave 6y ago
        Hello! The quality is currently limited by Google's API. I am working on getting some pre-trained models implemented, but voice processing is not my speciality as a software engineer. I do NOT want to spread misinformation nor do we want to unjustly slander anyone. Tonight I will be adding a disclaimer mentioning the limitations of our service and will make sure it is forefront on the website. Hopefully we can create a model which can deliver better results.
LVDOVICVS 6y ago
Thanks for the encouragement in continuing with my court reporting classes. It's still going to be a good career for the foreseeable future.
m0zg 6y ago
Speaking of which, does anyone know the _frequencies_ for police scanners in Seattle? I have an SDR box, but Googling yields nothing of value.
- smokelegend 6y ago
  Radio reference [dot] com Listed frequencies by federal/state/county/local departments Searchable for all.
whoisstan 6y ago
Very useful mapped version in NYC https://scanmap.mobi/NY/ https://scanmap.mobi/NY/
- smokelegend 6y ago
  This is awesome! This should be crowdsourced like piaware...
neilv 6y ago
When I was studying photojournalism on the side, for a while I ran a vintage radio scanner over the various local police/fire/etc. public simulcast frequencies. It didn't pay off with any "breaking news" leads, but one of the surprise benefits was the strong impression of professionalism and good nature by many. I should be clear that I know there's tragic racism and other injustices everywhere, and that problems tend to be worse than is visible to most people, and I think now is the time to finally right some wrongs that we should've a long time ago. Perhaps relevant to that, it was really reassuring to observe signs of goodness in the institutions that many people never have occasion to. Problems need to be solved, but there's hope from multiple directions.
optimumsuave 6y ago
Hello Hacker News!!! I am the developer of murph.live - I just want to thank all of you for taking the time to check it out and give us excellent feedback. I stumbled upon this post and now have goosebumps. This started by listening to police scanners throughout the night during recent protests in Seattle, WA. I wanted to help and I immediately put my credit card down for Google's Speech to Text API. As for the inbound streams, @blantonl is spot on - we use the streams from a premium account on broadcastify.com (thank you for not sending a cease and desist yet!). A few dockerized ffmpeg processes segment the streamed audio into 30 second wav files. Subsequently, sox removes silence from the audio files as police scanners have quite a bit of downtime between transmissions. The performance is very scalable using docker containers to record and trim. Currently, we pipe these trimmed wav files to the Google Speech API - as others have mentioned this is $$$. We are receiving donations, but this dependency on Google will eventually need to be eliminated. I have started looking into possible solutions using NLP and other acoustic models to bring the costs down. Honestly, speech processing is not my forte so I'm kind of shooting in the dark here. I am currently testing pre-trained models for wav2letter++, kaldi, vosk, and maybe deepspeech. We can all agree the quality of the transcripts is something to be desired and improved upon. Potentially dangerous if transcribed incorrectly, but nonetheless we wanted to launch to give citizens a platform to provide transparency into our government. The idea is what counts right now. Thanks again and I will be responding to a bunch of comments on here! You all rock!
- rasz 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322321 first comment might be of interest
quickthrower2 6y ago
Looks like DNN speak.
belorn 6y ago
Automatic recording, transcribing and publish. A recipe to force them to change equipment and start using encryption. I don't know the law in the US, but here in Sweden any police investgiation is kept under strict secrecy until completed. When a crime occur and journalist ask for details the answer is always the same. While investigation is ongoing no details may be given. That would not work if there is a searchable transcription of the communication online. So an nice technical achievement, but the more successful it is the faster it will be made obsolete in terms of getting information out of police scanners.
optimumsuave 6y ago
Developer of murph.live here again - after reading this thread I have some ideas I'd like to vet with everyone here. 1. We need to post links to the source of the stream. I neglected to do that for fear of cease and desist, but now I realize we need to create accountability on our own platform. I will be contacting broadcastify.com to ensure we can direct users to a source. 2. We need a disclaimer on the site directly in your face. I agree with everyone here - this could potentially spread misinformation and do more harm than intended. These transcripts should be read with caution. Additional messaging from us is a must. 3. We need a better acoustic model. Google is too much $$$ and although I'm an engineer, I'm not a linguistics machine learning expert. Can anyone help me with this please? Our mission was to create transparency into our government - not cause harm. There is a lot of responsibility creating a tool like this and we want to get it right. With that being said, this site blew up in a few hours. I'm overwhelmed. Please let me know if you'd like to help. Thank you to everyone for the feedback so far - it all helps immensely.
- someguydave 6y ago
  I doubt that the google speech model was meant to deal with AMBE compressed voice. I think you will need to create your own speech-to-text model to solve the quality issues.
- robotastic 6y ago
  It might be worth checking out https://www.assemblyai.com https://www.assemblyai.com they let you build a custom audio model. One challenge with the audio from these radios is that it goes through some heavy compression. Traditional models will have a lot of challenges. Give a system that uses analog audio a try. The quality of the audio is a lot better.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SpeakerFrThDead 6y ago
  Maybe https://www.deepgram.com https://www.deepgram.com can help with a custom speech-to-text model?
- 6y ago
inamberclad 6y ago
The emergency-service voice transmissions in the clear around me are fire and medical. I am presuming that the busy digital signals in the same VHF band are police.
solarengineer 6y ago
Given the current global (and US) social situation of mistrust of the police, and of people running wild with information, it may be wise to shut down this website and fix technical issues first. Otherwise, you do run the risk of "See the screenshots - the police transcriptions have been changed to become police friendly now!"
silveraxe93 6y ago
I was reading a post yesterday about how someone found difficult to gauge the level of violence in the current protests. As media is so polarised that you either get shots of peaceful protests or complete mayhem, depending on the paper's bias. This got me thinking: What if we get the police radio transcripts, and extract every mention of an address. Then have a central hub of drones that get dispatched automatically to any address of "interest" filming. It's a bit crazy, most likely illegal. But definitely would be cool to see! Arguably truly unbiased "reporting". If you want to know the situation, just plug in to the feeds and get a decent overview of how it looks.
nogbit 6y ago
This is so wrong it needs to be taken offline. The Translations aren’t even close and that’s dangerous. I seriously looked into doing this myself, but for this reason and costs I bailed.
pathhandwaving 6y ago
I didn't see where anyone pointed this out but scanners are only one way emergency services communicate and they also know people are listening in. More often than not the important conversations are communicated over the phone. It is also important to note that since these agencies know that civilians listen in it can become a way to intentionally misinform the listeners.

213 points by illuminated 6y ago

I really like this idea - it also has the side effect of making all of these streams easily searchable later on. That being said, transcription still isn't at the point where it can understand radio garble. > because I'm going to take that group that someone over the Willing. Can you raise Lieutenant lady and having semi-open Buddhist month > you know the carrot for you and Hudson no accident Reminds me of the early days of Google Voice voicemail transcription.

bberenberg 6y ago
Absolutely agree. I feel like the next step here would be to: * Put the audio clip next to the transcribed text * Flag transcribed text which fails some heuristics * Allows users to suggest edits to the transcription * Train the transcription models on contributed edits + police specific lingo
- gfosco 6y ago
  Cooperative community editing, genius-style, would be perfect. Big events would lead to incredibly accurate transcripts.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wfbarks 6y ago
"strength tenets we do not have any to 9 available yeah five-year-old advisor. We have several dogs around miracles"

abrichr 6y ago

This is great. Is it open source? I would love to know more about how it works. Where do you get the source data? What is required in order to add more cities? Thanks for sharing!

yasoob 6y ago
I would assume that its piping the audio output from a radio receiver to some live transcription API. Would also love to find out how it actually works.

blantonl 6y ago

This is very impressive. I'm the owner of Broadcastify.com, where presumably these streams are being transcribed from. We've dabbled in this space and looked at real-world approaches to taking something like this to market, but transcribing 7000+ streams to text seems like an expensive (computational) and ($$) effort that needs a lot of investigation. Note to mention that the individual lexicons between streams are drastically different. I wonder how the developer has done the integration to our streams... because I never heard from them :)

robbiet480 6y ago
Hey Lindsay, I'm the one who just added EBRCS to Calls. Wondering if a solution to both cost problems would be to (optionally) have submitters upload a transcript along with each call? Could build a model into trunk-recorder maybe?
- blantonl 6y ago
  That might be an option, but we'd have to somehow get trained models down to the client, which is one of the issues. We're working on client ingest models now that work on more of a "tasking" perspective, where someone deploys a device that is GPS enabled and then we send an ingest task to fill in coverage, start new coverage, etc. But this is predicated on low cost ingest devices (read: RPi and RTL sticks) which might not have the horsepower needed for transcription at the client level.
  - johann8384 6y ago
    That would be cool, kind of like GroundStation or SatNOGS
lunixbochs 6y ago
I prototyped this concept too, at https://feeds.talonvoice.com https://feeds.talonvoice.com with prohibitively expensive Google speech recognition, but also have a feature for users to listen and fix transcriptions. If murph was anything like me they probably paid for broadcastify and tailed a couple of the static mp3 feeds. My plan was to collect user transcription corrections on my site then train my own inexpensive models on them. The open-source speech tech I work on can do passable transcription at close to 100x faster than realtime on a quad core desktop CPU (or 200 simultaneous streams per 4-core box at 50% activity). With higher quality transcription it's closer to 10-20x faster than realtime. For your case you could also try to push some of the computation down to the uploading machine. These models can run on a raspberry pi. I think the biggest work for a new effort here is going to be building local language models and collecting transcribed audio to train on. However, there have been a couple of incredible advances in the last year for semi-supervised speech recognition learning, where we can probably leverage your 1 year backlog as "unsupervised training data" while only having a small portion of it properly transcribed. The current state-of-the-art paper uses around 100 hours of transcribed audio and 60,000 hours of unlabeled audio, and I bet you could push the 100h requirement down with a good language model and mixing in existing training data from non-radio sources.

lunixbochs 6y ago

I built something similar to this, open-source, here: https://feeds.talonvoice.com https://feeds.talonvoice.com It's not currently streaming any feeds because Google Speech is pretty expensive, but I have the expertise and plan to train my own speech models that would be less expensive to run and more accurate than Google at this task as well. The main difference between this and murph is my `feeds` site has UI for users to listen to the audio and fix/vote on transcriptions, and corrections are propagated quickly to other users.

rachelbythebay 6y ago

Example audio: https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351 https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/29351 This is close enough to the Seattle feed that you can do a compare & contrast. Heard: "clear my first call ocean nora 470" On the site: "charlie my first call" So, yeah, this still has a long long way to go. I considered and discarded this in 2011 because it was pure insanity, and as another comment suggests, it's highly context-sensitive. "ECR" is El Camino Real. "Vets" is Veterans Blvd. But... "Code 99" is the emergency button... for one department... and it means something else entirely for another, just 20 miles apart. I'd love to have it, but it still seems out of reach.

elicash 6y ago
Seems like there could be a lot of use cases where you don't need anything even close to perfection.
jcims 6y ago
Your scanner project was a marvel to me at the time. Until a system can train right down to the officer/dispatcher I don't see how this gets beyond 50-60% accurate. I can't even transcribe half the calls, not sure why I should expect a computer to (at this time anyway).
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Like to see a way to play the original audio clip the OCR came from. Sorry, talking about the project this thread is linked to.

pugworthy 6y ago

Some of the text though are pretty weak. I have no idea if this is just garbled transcription, or dreamy cop talk... "movie up and around pain and dreamy I'm not" or "happy person that you can just so may I help you"

lunixbochs 6y ago
It's the transcription, I think this kind of site should allow you to fall back to listening to the audio. Even with high accuracy, if there's no human curation, there will be pretty awkward mistakes every once in a while in the text.

atarian 6y ago

Apart from the police and people listening out of interest/curiosity, who else taps into police scanners? It seems like a really narrow and competitive niche to be in for developers.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Local news services.
robbiet480 6y ago
According to Broadcastify (https://www.broadcastify.com/ https://www.broadcastify.com/), there's 43k listeners across 7000 streams right now
lobster45 6y ago
Criminals
- kube-system 6y ago
  I hear people say this from time to time, but I don't think I've ever heard anything actually said on a scanner that would be plausibly useful to a criminal.
  - smokelegend 6y ago
    Not true, police communications can be a gold mine of information sometimes. Name, address, date of birth, social security number, identifying features i.e. height, weight, hair color, etc. Don't underestimate how valuable this information can be. Not to mention the movements of police resources and personnel. All said published over the wire, anyone can hear with the right hardware/software.
blantonl 6y ago
It is ridiculously competitive in the mobile app store market, because there is a lot of revenue out there. All of the apps source their streams from Broadcastify, and they license Broadcastify's API and content to do so. The apps are enormously popular, and the market generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. I deal constantly with nefarious developers who often feel like Broadcastify has an obligation to grant them a license. We had a terrible dust up this weekend with a developer that was upset we wouldn't grant him a license to develop "yet another police scanner app" and he went on a warpath with me personally. The app store environment is a major pain and exhausting...

mhh__ 6y ago

Is it legal to listen to these in the states? I know OFCOM (UK FCC) state it's illegal to listen to certain frequencies without permission, which seems delightfully unenforceable (for legal reasons I most definitely do not possess a wideband software defined radio or a similarly sensitive antenna)

jauer 6y ago
(not a lawyer, if one shows up, listen to them) Generally speaking, you can listen to anything, as long as it's not for commercial gain. The exception to this is mobile phones, because it was trivial to listen to them using children's toy radios. There's apparently some uncertainty around handling of encrypted emergency services communications: https://www.rtdna.org/content/scanners https://www.rtdna.org/content/scanners https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulgence-radio-communications https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...
ryanwatkins 6y ago
Yes, it is legal in the US. Federal law allows it - P.R. 91-36 (FCC 93-410), though New York law attempts to make it illegal to do in your car: https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sect-397.html https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sec...

tapmap 6y ago

Would be great to link to the real recording, so you can hear it for yourself.

yellow_postit 6y ago

Neat! Wonder what service they are using for the transcription as some of the results are pretty rough probably from both poor quality audio and a unique lexicon. Custom speech models could probably go a long way here to clean it up and I would bet there’s some public interest in contributing transcriptions for training if the site allowed user submitted corrections. Having this indexed and searchable could be powerful.

starpilot 6y ago

> got another call from the zombie shelter for 24th Avenue got two males waiting inside Oh shit.

stuartaxelowen 6y ago

Very cool! Is this yours, OP? I built a text classifier platform (https://www.taggit.io/ https://www.taggit.io/) and I'd love to explore building something on top of this text stream to notify people of important happenings around the protests in real time.

illuminated 6y ago
Not mine, I've got the URL over IM few minutes before posting it here
- stuartaxelowen 6y ago
  Thanks!

busterarm 6y ago

Which channel though? In each of these cities there are several frequencies...

larrywright 6y ago

This actually would solve one of my use cases that broadcastify itself does not. I don't listen to the scanner often, and often when I do it's in response to hearing sirens or seeing something. By then, the call has already gone out so tuning in to the scanner isn't all that helpful. Having transcripts of recent calls available would be quite useful.

petee 6y ago

Nice but mostly incoherent - "Google Launcher new job and I want to play better third-party colder or does the people from the vegetable okay"

ycombonator 6y ago

Maybe we should “defund the police” and never call 911 when we get burgled, assaulted and murdered. How about we start with Beverly Hills.

flaque 6y ago

I’m so glad someone did this

vondur 6y ago

Our local PD is going to be encrypting their communications soon I believe.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

The speech-to-text transcription is so incredibly wrong that it's almost dangerous to publish it like this. For instance: > at the beach view new screen for assistance there is a needle in his hand he's foaming from his mouth throwing off this item What the officer actually said on the radio: > He was going to Rainier Beach area. A request for assistance to approach two people with needles. <operator>: Call was from a neighbor in the area.

MengYuanLong 6y ago
I don't have familiarity with speech-to-text but wouldn't it be possible to weight words based on their probability in this application to help resolve this. For example, suspect is probably a low frequency word in normal speech but very high in radio chatter.
- amluto 6y ago
  This needs care. Imagine if you accidentally trained a model that added racism when none was present in the audio.
  - VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
    Or used a weird model like this one which does some sort of Markov chaining to complete sentences that weren't even present in the original audio or transcription. "foaming at the mouth" was never even close to being uttered on the radio. I'm guessing the (flawed) model inserted that part because of the proximity to the word "needle" and "assistance". Maybe? No idea.. this website it totally fucked.
    - optimumsuave 6y ago
      Hello! The quality is currently limited by Google's API. I am working on getting some pre-trained models implemented, but voice processing is not my speciality as a software engineer. I do NOT want to spread misinformation nor do we want to unjustly slander anyone. Tonight I will be adding a disclaimer mentioning the limitations of our service and will make sure it is forefront on the website. Hopefully we can create a model which can deliver better results.

LVDOVICVS 6y ago

Thanks for the encouragement in continuing with my court reporting classes. It's still going to be a good career for the foreseeable future.

m0zg 6y ago

Speaking of which, does anyone know the _frequencies_ for police scanners in Seattle? I have an SDR box, but Googling yields nothing of value.

smokelegend 6y ago
Radio reference [dot] com Listed frequencies by federal/state/county/local departments Searchable for all.

whoisstan 6y ago

Very useful mapped version in NYC https://scanmap.mobi/NY/ https://scanmap.mobi/NY/

smokelegend 6y ago
This is awesome! This should be crowdsourced like piaware...

neilv 6y ago

When I was studying photojournalism on the side, for a while I ran a vintage radio scanner over the various local police/fire/etc. public simulcast frequencies. It didn't pay off with any "breaking news" leads, but one of the surprise benefits was the strong impression of professionalism and good nature by many. I should be clear that I know there's tragic racism and other injustices everywhere, and that problems tend to be worse than is visible to most people, and I think now is the time to finally right some wrongs that we should've a long time ago. Perhaps relevant to that, it was really reassuring to observe signs of goodness in the institutions that many people never have occasion to. Problems need to be solved, but there's hope from multiple directions.

optimumsuave 6y ago

Hello Hacker News!!! I am the developer of murph.live - I just want to thank all of you for taking the time to check it out and give us excellent feedback. I stumbled upon this post and now have goosebumps. This started by listening to police scanners throughout the night during recent protests in Seattle, WA. I wanted to help and I immediately put my credit card down for Google's Speech to Text API. As for the inbound streams, @blantonl is spot on - we use the streams from a premium account on broadcastify.com (thank you for not sending a cease and desist yet!). A few dockerized ffmpeg processes segment the streamed audio into 30 second wav files. Subsequently, sox removes silence from the audio files as police scanners have quite a bit of downtime between transmissions. The performance is very scalable using docker containers to record and trim. Currently, we pipe these trimmed wav files to the Google Speech API - as others have mentioned this is $$$. We are receiving donations, but this dependency on Google will eventually need to be eliminated. I have started looking into possible solutions using NLP and other acoustic models to bring the costs down. Honestly, speech processing is not my forte so I'm kind of shooting in the dark here. I am currently testing pre-trained models for wav2letter++, kaldi, vosk, and maybe deepspeech. We can all agree the quality of the transcripts is something to be desired and improved upon. Potentially dangerous if transcribed incorrectly, but nonetheless we wanted to launch to give citizens a platform to provide transparency into our government. The idea is what counts right now. Thanks again and I will be responding to a bunch of comments on here! You all rock!

rasz 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322321 first comment might be of interest

quickthrower2 6y ago

Looks like DNN speak.

belorn 6y ago

Automatic recording, transcribing and publish. A recipe to force them to change equipment and start using encryption. I don't know the law in the US, but here in Sweden any police investgiation is kept under strict secrecy until completed. When a crime occur and journalist ask for details the answer is always the same. While investigation is ongoing no details may be given. That would not work if there is a searchable transcription of the communication online. So an nice technical achievement, but the more successful it is the faster it will be made obsolete in terms of getting information out of police scanners.

optimumsuave 6y ago

Developer of murph.live here again - after reading this thread I have some ideas I'd like to vet with everyone here. 1. We need to post links to the source of the stream. I neglected to do that for fear of cease and desist, but now I realize we need to create accountability on our own platform. I will be contacting broadcastify.com to ensure we can direct users to a source. 2. We need a disclaimer on the site directly in your face. I agree with everyone here - this could potentially spread misinformation and do more harm than intended. These transcripts should be read with caution. Additional messaging from us is a must. 3. We need a better acoustic model. Google is too much $$$ and although I'm an engineer, I'm not a linguistics machine learning expert. Can anyone help me with this please? Our mission was to create transparency into our government - not cause harm. There is a lot of responsibility creating a tool like this and we want to get it right. With that being said, this site blew up in a few hours. I'm overwhelmed. Please let me know if you'd like to help. Thank you to everyone for the feedback so far - it all helps immensely.

someguydave 6y ago
I doubt that the google speech model was meant to deal with AMBE compressed voice. I think you will need to create your own speech-to-text model to solve the quality issues.
robotastic 6y ago
It might be worth checking out https://www.assemblyai.com https://www.assemblyai.com they let you build a custom audio model. One challenge with the audio from these radios is that it goes through some heavy compression. Traditional models will have a lot of challenges. Give a system that uses analog audio a try. The quality of the audio is a lot better.
deleted 6y ago
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SpeakerFrThDead 6y ago
Maybe https://www.deepgram.com https://www.deepgram.com can help with a custom speech-to-text model?
6y ago

inamberclad 6y ago

The emergency-service voice transmissions in the clear around me are fire and medical. I am presuming that the busy digital signals in the same VHF band are police.

solarengineer 6y ago

Given the current global (and US) social situation of mistrust of the police, and of people running wild with information, it may be wise to shut down this website and fix technical issues first. Otherwise, you do run the risk of "See the screenshots - the police transcriptions have been changed to become police friendly now!"

silveraxe93 6y ago

I was reading a post yesterday about how someone found difficult to gauge the level of violence in the current protests. As media is so polarised that you either get shots of peaceful protests or complete mayhem, depending on the paper's bias. This got me thinking: What if we get the police radio transcripts, and extract every mention of an address. Then have a central hub of drones that get dispatched automatically to any address of "interest" filming. It's a bit crazy, most likely illegal. But definitely would be cool to see! Arguably truly unbiased "reporting". If you want to know the situation, just plug in to the feeds and get a decent overview of how it looks.

nogbit 6y ago

This is so wrong it needs to be taken offline. The Translations aren’t even close and that’s dangerous. I seriously looked into doing this myself, but for this reason and costs I bailed.

pathhandwaving 6y ago

I didn't see where anyone pointed this out but scanners are only one way emergency services communicate and they also know people are listening in. More often than not the important conversations are communicated over the phone. It is also important to note that since these agencies know that civilians listen in it can become a way to intentionally misinform the listeners.