Automatically transcribe your Evernote voice notes

I am a big believer in taking notes and working on my personal infrastructure. I find joy in polishing the “Artur OS” and removing little pockets of friction in my setup. Have a look at my automation philosophy:

https://deliber.at/2019/y-u-bots/

Recently, we adopted a dog and I have quite a bit of time spent walking. What if I could use it for some deep thinking?

So I wrote a bot.

How does it work?

A: I record an audio note on my phone:

B: I run my magical code

C: A transcription shows underneath

D: Profit!

There are other ways to solve this problem. Particularly, Otter.AI is a great service to transcribe your notes. However, it requires extra manual steps to open the app, export recordings, etc.

If you don’t have an elaborate setup behind your Evernote account, I recommend you check out Otter.

What do you need:

  1. You need to set up the PHP (Yes) SDK for Evernote
  2. You need an API key to Google Cloud Speech API. You don’t need a client library! Just follow these steps:
    1. Enable the API for your project here
    2. Create a new “API Interface Key” here

This code assumes you already search for a note and pass it in. I tag a note with `Tools`. A cron job periodically checks the label and does certain magical things on the notes tagged with it.

Code

It finds the audio recording in your Evernote note and transcribes it:

<?php
// https://piszek.com/2020/05/27/evernote-transcriber/
function transcribe_audio_file_in_a_note( $evernoteClient, $note ) {
// This will find the place where file is embedded, so we can display the transcription underneath.
if( preg_match( '#<en-media hash="([a-z0-9]+)"[^>]+>#is', $note->content, $res ) ) {
$id = hex2bin($res[1] );
$resources = array_filter( $note->resources, function( $resource ) use ( $id ) {
return $resource->data->bodyHash === $id;
} );
if( $resources ) {
$resource = array_shift( $resources );
}
}
if ( isset( $resource->mime ) && $resource->mime === 'audio/x-m4a' ) {
// Only audio files
if ( isset( $resource->attributes->applicationData->keysOnly['transcribed'] ) ) {
$this->log( LOG_INFO, 'This resource is already transcribed.' );
return;
}
// Set for the future
$evernoteClient->client->getNoteStore()->setResourceApplicationDataEntry( $resource->guid, 'transcribed', 'true' );
// this is your Google Speech API token
$token = "tsrtrastr8astars8tras8t";
$in = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'evernote_transcript') . '.mp4';
$out = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'evernote_transcript') . '.wav';
$data = $evernoteClient->client->getNoteStore()->getResourceData( $resource->guid );
file_put_contents( $in, $data );
// Because Google Speech API is crap and cannot deal with other formats, we have to recode it.
system( "ffmpeg -i $in $out" );
$data = file_get_contents( $out );
$payload = array(
"audio" => array( "content" => base64_encode( $data ) ),
"config" => array(
"languageCode" => "en-US",
"alternativeLanguageCodes" => [ "pl-PL" ], // I only use English or Polish. Your mileage may vary.
"encoding" => "LINEAR16",
"sampleRateHertz" => 44100,
"maxAlternatives" => 1,
"enableAutomaticPunctuation" => true
)
);
$payload = json_encode( $payload );
$context = stream_context_create( array(
'http' => array(
'ignore_errors' => true,
'header' => "Content-Type: application/json\r\n",
'method' => 'POST',
'content' => $payload
)
) );
// Wondering about the v1p1beta1 here? You have to use this version to have alternativeLanguageCodes. This of course is not in documentation.
$result = file_get_contents( "https://speech.googleapis.com/v1p1beta1/speech:recognize?fields=results&key=$token&quot;, false, $context );
$result = json_decode( $result, true );
if ( ! isset ( $result['results'][0]['alternatives'][0]['transcript'] ) ) {
$this->log( LOG_WARNING, 'Empty transcript. ' . print_r( $result, true ) );
return;
}
$text = $result['results'][0]['alternatives'][0]['transcript'];
$this->log( LOG_INFO, 'Transcript OK: ' . $text );
$new_body = str_replace( $res[0], $res[0] . "<div style='font-style: italic'>$text</div>",$note->content );
$note->content = $new_body;
$evernoteClient->client->getNoteStore()->updateNote( $note );
}
return $note->content;
}
view raw transcribe_audio_file_in_an_evernote_note.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

More of my adventures in automation:

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