SpeakEZ

The University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History has a backlog of thousands of interviews that need time-stamped, speaker-labeled, accurate transcriptions. Manually processing the transcriptions is time-consuming and resource-heavy, and new ADA requirements have set a hard deadline for April 2026. Without these ADA-compliant transcripts, the interviews must be taken down from the public database, rendering valuable cultural information inaccessible.

In collaboration with Doug Boyd, PhD, Director of the Nunn Center, CAAI has developed SpeakEZ, a tenant of the CAT-Talk platform customized specifically for the needs of the Nunn Center. SpeakEZ allows users to upload audiovisual files and generate transcriptions with speaker labels (diarization) and timestamps. In addition, the system can extract themes from the oral history interviews, identify places/names mentioned during the interview, and flag risqué topics that might need to be censored before an interview is released publicly. SpeakEZ provides an easy-to-use solution that radically simplifies the transcription process while adding new, desirable features.

Currently, SpeakEZ is being prepared for a beta-testing phase before production roll-out.

https://libraries.uky.edu/locations/special-collections-research-center/louie-b-nunn-center-oral-history