Praat on the Web: an upgrade of Praat for semi-automatic speech annotation

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of the widely used speech analysis tool Praat as a web application with an extended functionality for feature annotation. In particular, Praat on the Web addresses some of the central limitations of the original Praat tool and provides (i) enhanced visualization of annotations in a dedicated window for feature annotation at interval and point segments, (ii) a dynamic scripting composition exemplified with a modular prosody tagger, and (iii) portability and an operational web interface. Speech annotation tools with such a functionality are key for exploring large corpora and designing modular pipelines.