Getting Involved with Srila Prabhupada's Audio to Text Fidelity Project

Welcome to an opportunity to offer direct service to Śrīla Prabhupāda's voice. We are proofreading the transcriptions of his lectures and conversations to make sure that the text is exactly the words spoken by Śrīla Prabhupāda. This is a very simple service to do and only needs an attentive ear and the desire to serve.

Here are the steps to start.

1 - Send an email introducing yourself to [email protected]. Rishab will then add you as an editor of the Google spreadsheet we use to oversee the project:

http://tinyurl.com/Text-to-Audio-Fidelity

2 - Choose a lecture from the list on our Google Spreadsheet. At the moment we are completing the lectures of 1976. Enter your name and the date that you start proofreading the file next to the lecture you choose. This will make sure we don't have two people doing the same work.

3 - Copy the text of the lecture from the page into a blank Microsoft Word file, go to the review tab, and click track changes.

4 - To clarify what is actually spoken you might need to listen to some words a few times, and this is much easier to do with an offline audio file. The easiest way to download the audio file from the Vanisource page is to use a browser extension. There are many of these for both Firefox and Chrome which let you download any video or audio you are playing on a page.

Try http://www.downloadhelper.net/ for Firefox, or FVD downloader for Chrome.

5 - Then simply listen to the lecture and edit the text if it is different to what you hear. Here is a list of the most common things to look out for. This link is also at the top of the Google Spreadsheet:

http://vanimedia.org/wiki/TO_DO_list_for_Audio_to_Text_Fidelity_Project

When you are done, send Rishab the Microsoft Word file and he will be able to see exactly what you changed.

If you have any questions please let him know by skype or email. His skype name is rishab.hauter.

Thanks for coming forward. We hope you will relish this service as much as other devotees are.

your grateful servants from Vanipedia