Week 9 Blog: Finishing Work on RealtimeSTT

Hello Readers!

This week I have finally gotten RealtimeSTT to work with my system. After reworking the main loop of my server to be able to handle both audio messages in the form of bytes and text strings from the client, I was able to use JavaScript to implement a function that toggled input from the microphone and sent the audio and some metadata in the form of a JavaScript Blob (Binary Large Object).

After the server obtained the audio data, I attempted to send the data after removing the metadata from the Blob to the RealtimeSTT AudioToTextRecorder object which would handle transcription. Unfortunately, I ran into many issues with this step as although it was capable of producing somewhat real time transcription, it was relatively inaccurate at this stage. In the example code, a much slower but more accurate STT model appeared to run simultaneously on a separate thread, replacing the inaccurate transcription with a much better one but taking significantly longer. However, since this is just a prototype, having either of these problems should still be fine for this project. I also ran into some issues with async methods which I eventually resolved.

Overall, I am on track to finish this project and its presentation next week, and I hope to see you next week!