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# Audio Transcript Requirements

This appendix outlines the requirements for audio transcripts that you use to build custom language models or adapt acoustic models.

- Use plain text (.txt) files and UTF-8 character encoding.
- Transcribe all speech verbatim.
- Use upper and lower case in accordance with common usage.
- Use correct punctuation. Mark the ends of sentences with periods (.). Use other punctuation, such as question marks and exclamation marks, as required. Add a white space after punctuation at the end of a sentence; for example ". A" not ".A".
- Do not use single or double quotation marks.
- Transcribe acronyms in accordance with common usage. Do not use white space or periods between the characters; for example, “FBI”, “SNCF”, “NATO”.
- Transcribe false starts and interjections, even if the speaker pronounces only half of the word; for example, “good eve- er good evening”. Transcribe these interjections as they sound; the following examples are all acceptable: “Uh-huh”, “Er”, “Huh”, “Ah”, and “Um”.
- If you cannot clearly hear a word, use your best guess for transcribing it. Any word that sounds similar to what you can hear and is appropriate to the sentence is acceptable.
- Spell proper nouns in accordance with common usage.
- Insert a paragraph break on speaker changes. No other indication of speakers is required.
- If you are not sure of the spelling of a name, use your best guess; for example, “Now over to our correspondent Christopher Balgarick”.
- Where speakers talk over each other or the speech is too loud, mark it using your own discretion.

## Manually Normalize Text

IDOL Speech Server can normalize text in many languages (see Supported Languages) but not all. For languages for which text normalization is not supported, you must manually normalize the files.

To manually normalize files

- Change digits to words. For example, replace "2" with "two", and "1997" with "nineteen ninety seven".

- Write individually pronounced character sequences as spaced characters; for example, “the word rules is spelled R U L E S”. Write pronounced punctuation as it sounds; for example, “Tony at BBC dot co dot UK.
- For all sentence breaks, replace periods (.) with <s>.

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