AudioCensor

Inspiration

Blood and Concrete: A Love Story.

You mother BEEP er, come on you little BEEP… BEEP with me, eh? You BEEP little BEEP, BEEP BEEP BEEP…

P.S. Also dedicated to those who like voice messages a lot.

What it does

It is a tool for automatic audio bleep censoring. As a proof of concept, we've put it inside a Telegram bot @audiocensor_bot to play with.

How we built it

UI: Telegram bot with python-telegram-bot, hosted on Heroku with a webhook.

NN: Deep Recurrent Convolutional NN on Keras with TensorFlow.

Data: Friends (kindly sweared on us by request); hand-picked pieces of audio from open sources.

Challenges we ran into

• Existing speech processing tools (like Google Cloud) are mainly focused on Speech-to-Text task, which may help us but still does more work than needed. So, to trigger on a very limited set of words and stems, we decided to move to our own RNN.
• We've made our small word recordings dataset representative and homogeneous enough (in terms of voice qualities, background noises, loudness speed and so on).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We've managed to collect our own bootstrapped dataset, generated from ~50 obscene and 'normal' word samples.
• First time dared to participate in data science track on a hackathon.
• Solved the first audio processing task in our datascience lives :)

What we learned

• As no team members had ever worked with audio data, we had to learn a lot from the very basics of speech preprocessing and augmentation.
• Managing webhook of a project with complex dependencies by Heroku.

What's next for AudioCensor

• Streaming usage: online telephony and other streaming services (Twitch / etc).
• Better dataset and more experiments on model and augmentation.

Built With

• heroku
• keras
• python
• python-telegram-bot
• tensorflow