What is it?

Percy is a device-independent tool to perform online perception experiments. Researchers can learn something about spoken language via setting up an experiment design where participants listen to audio stimuli and can give their judgment about it afterwards.

For Whom is it?

Percy is a tool that can be used by researchers who want to know something about spoken language but it is also quite interesting for the participants as they can give judgements about the stimuli and manipulate them.  

And the Details?

To define an experiment design a researcher first has to think about what stimuli, input options and questions he or she wants to present to the participant. The researcher can chose among three options for setting up the experiment design: He or she can (1) use the inbuilt editor, (2) use the default user interface or (3) contact percy@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de for a more advanced experiment design. There is also the possibility to choose from a set of experiments that were already conducted. 

https://youtu.be/G-TVDx5KQBs

This video tutorial about WebMAUS - the Munich AUtomatic Segmentation explains how you can easily generate a textgrid file that aligns an audio signal to a transcription out of the application. If you want to learn more about WebMAUS in general click here. The procedure to receive the textgrid is quite simple. You just need your text file containing the transcription and your corresponding audio file with spoken language and feed it into the application via drag-and-drop (careful! the files need to have the same name.

After this step, a menu drops down where you can select your preferences and hit the 'run' button. After a few seconds, WebMAUS has created a textgrid for you which you can download and open in PRAAT along with your audio file and check where WebMAUS has segmented your file and further process it. 

https://youtu.be/7lI-gOShtFA

This video tutorial gives a brief introduction to the Munich AUtomatic Segmentation -- or WebMAUS. It is a tool to align speech signals to linguistic categories which makes it, amongst other things, possible to align the audio signal of a video to its transcript. As input, WebMAUS needs a video signal and some kind of a transcription of the spoken text. 

To get the actual output, the input text first needs to be normalized. With the Balloon tool, the expected pronunciation is created in SAMPA (a phonetic alphabet). In a next step, all other possible variants of pronunciation are made along with their probability. All those other possible pronunciations are visualized in a probabilistic graph where finally WebMAUS searches for the path of phonetic units that have truly been spoken. The outcome is a transcript of the real pronunciation along with its segmentation. 

There is an open source download and a web application. The usage is free for all academic members of Europe.