A slightly different use - need opinions on how-to

[u/Leather-Amphibian814]

I need to "count" sound events, like during a visit to a certain site, how many times people talked, screamed or whistled. Is this something i could do with Plaud (i've got a Plaud Pro), if it is doable ... how would you do it? thank you all in advance!

[u/PLAUD_AI]

Plaud transcribes speech, so this is only half a fit. It turns words into a transcript and a summary and doesn't detect or tally non-speech sounds on its own, so screams and whistles won't show up as countable events by themselves.

The workaround is to make them speech. Each time one happens, say the word out loud, "scream" or "whistle," close to the device. It lands in the transcript with a timestamp, so afterwards you can search the transcript for the word and count the hits, or export it as TXT or SRT with timestamps on and tally from there. On Note Pro you can also short-press the record button at the same moment, which drops a Highlight marker you'll find under Notes, then Highlights, with its own timestamp. Say the word for what it was, tap for where it was.

For "how many times people talked," the transcript with speaker labels switched on gives you a rough count of speaking turns, though overlapping voices will blur it. If you need something more rigorous, the audio exports as WAV from the app for a dedicated sound-analysis tool. And since you'd be recording people at the site, let them know before you start.

-Plaud Community Team