Didi Home Page

Didi (Dialog Displayer) is a freeware package for simple display, playback, and labeling of conversations and other speech signals.
Didi Overview
Nigel Ward
University of Tokyo
January 1998

This document describes in general terms what Didi is intended for. More information appears in the Users Manual and in the Limitations List. Didi Screendump

1. Purposes

The specific thing that Didi supports best is our own work, which involves looking for prosodic and voicing correlates of conversation phenomena, among other topics. More details are available at http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/. Since we study lots of things, we have kept the core code simple, to make it easier for each user to extend and customize (in C).

We have also used Didi for: labeling the words in a speech sample to prepare data to use for training word-based speech recognizers, labeling phrases from a dialog in order to use them as voice prompts etc., and for a labeling assignment in a course on Natural Language and Speech Processing.

2. Hardware and Software Requirements

Sun Sparcstation 5 or 10 etc, running SunOS 4.1, with X, /usr/demo/SOUND, or

PC with a soundcard or a sound chipset, running Linux, with X, and soundcard driver (standard or from 4Front Technologies)

3. Rival Packages

ESPS/xWaves+
an industrial strength waveform analysis package, originally developed at Bell Labs, for Linux and Mac OS-X, downloadable from LDC here
WaveSurfer
a Tcl/Tk -based tool for a wide range of tasks in speech research, freeware from KTH, available here
CSL
the Computerized Speech Laboratory, sold by Kay Elemetrics, a PC-based hardware/software combination originally developed for a university phonetics laboratory.
SFS
the Speech Filing System, freeware from the University College London, again with a phonetics research orientation, available here
Transcriber
freeware from DGA, in France, "geared towards the transcription of long duration broadcast news recordings", available here Also with extensions to support meeting transcription at ICSI.
Praat
``a research, publication, and productivity tool for phoneticians'', freeware from the University of Amstermdam, available here
WinPitchPro
``acoustic analysis software'' with a ``carefully designed interface'', available here
VoiceWalker
``designed to facilitate the transcription of recorded speech'', for discourse analysis applications, shareware from the University of Santa Barbara, available here
DialogueView
"a tool for annotating dialogs" which "provides several views of the data", available here
other
for other tools see the LDC Annotation Page and Linux-Sound
Compared to these systems, Didi's is relatively primitive, but it is good for its niche, namely the analysis of phenomena of dialog.

4. Authors

Didi was written by Nigel Ward and incorporates contributions by Wataru Tsukahara and Yuichiro Fukuchi, all of the University of Tokyo. The Linux port was done by Wataru Tsukahara with follow-up by Rafael Escalante, Anais Rivera and Tasha Hollingsed.

Suggestions and bug fixes should be sent to nigelward@acm.org.

5. Download

Up to Nigel's Home Page