Interesting question. I live in Belgium and… well first of all I don’t care for Christmas. I do like to celebrate with family and friends but the religious celebration itself, no. Second I never actually considered it. I do love snow and ice. I recently took on ice skating and… even though I also love the Summer where I can roller blade and skate, knowing that something else is coming is a genuine joy.

So… I can’t speak for others but I absolutely love the Winter, from hot chocolate to waffle outside to ice skating, hikes in the snow then relaxing by the file place, there is just so much to look for during that season that … never dreamt of “a green Christmas”.

Edit: I actually had one last year, going to Madeiras, Portuguese island West of Morocco, North of Africa, and… that was fine too. Honestly truth is I don’t really care where and how as long as we share a good time.

Might open up a GDPR related issue there. I don’t think people using such a library assume they need connectivity nor that their data would be send to a 3rd party.

Thanks for the clarification. I checked the code you linked and noticed recognize_google and seems it’s relying on https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition which then seems to rely on https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/speech_recognition/recognizers/google.py so basically are they using an API, sending all the audio data to Google servers?

I used pandoc for this.

Please come back and share if it’s done better or worst and if so along which dimensions. Quite curious to better understand the differences.

converting audio files to markdown must be a pretty recent feature

Quite curious… does it actually do that and if so how? Because STT to get a plaintext file or subtitle (so with timing) has been available via e.g. Whisper quite efficiently for a while now. If this though does do more, e.g. structure (differentiating a title, list, etc) I’d like to learn how.

PS: related, asked on Github too https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/issues/20#issuecomment-2544630753

audio transcription tool

Thanks for the clarification but I’m a bit confused here, like audio transcription, STT, done by e.g. Whisper? If so what’s the use case? When I think of Office documents audio transcription is not something I have in mind.

soffice works as CLI, can be called from Python and has plenty of related tooling, e.g. https://pypi.org/project/unoserver/ so I agree, I’m confused at what’s actually novel and better than that or even dedicated long lasting FLOSS projects like pandoc.

FWIW if you are interested in such tooling consider also soffice and pandoc which have (as far as I can tell) similar features but have been existing for years now and are not related to Microsoft.

Edit: not related to Microsoft AND Google, seems the transcription aspect (which IMHO is still weird in that context but OK) is done via Google servers, cf https://lemmy.ml/post/23629310/15586865