I’m assisting some of our linguistically inclined faculty and some of their colleagues at other institutions locate a telephone recording service. It is to record speakers of Hawaiian and other indigenous languages having normal conversations so that they may be analyzed at a later date. Participants need to be able to call each other from mobile phone or land line, and it needs to be easy to do as many of these folks are elderly and not technologically inclined.
What I envision is a service where by:
- call originator calls this service. They may dial a unique number for their conversation partner, or perhaps their is a single phone number and you enter a couple of numbers to identify who you wish to speak to.
- service connects them to their conversation partner.
- service records the conversation in an uncompressed or loss-less compression format which can be accessed either by calling into the system or by the web.
GrandCentral looks interesting but is in beta and does not yet service Hawai’i. I’ve tried a companies that do voice messaging, and all of them can do this except that they cannot call outside of our phone system. We only want to be a relay and record service. Very few, if any conversations, will be with our staff or faculty.
We have hours and hours of interviews with Hawaiian speakers, but very few of natural conversation, and that is the goal of this project. Ideas anyone?
