nyra-forced-aligner 0.2.1__tar.gz
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- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/LICENSE +26 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/PKG-INFO +290 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/README.md +254 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/__init__.py +18 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/aligner.py +257 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/cli.py +96 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/decoder.py +193 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/decoder_gpu.py +165 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/decoder_jit.py +166 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/export.py +233 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/features.py +190 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/g2p.py +216 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/graph.py +251 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/kaldi_text.py +301 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/model.py +131 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/outputs.py +117 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_align/version.py +1 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/PKG-INFO +290 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/SOURCES.txt +24 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/dependency_links.txt +1 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/entry_points.txt +4 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/requires.txt +12 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/nyra_forced_aligner.egg-info/top_level.txt +1 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/pyproject.toml +59 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/setup.cfg +4 -0
- nyra_forced_aligner-0.2.1/tests/test_core.py +165 -0
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MIT License
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Copyright (c) 2026 nyra health GmbH
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Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
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of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
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in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
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copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
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furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
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copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
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IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
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FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
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LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
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OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
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SOFTWARE.
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This MIT License covers the inference code in this repository only. The
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model files distributed on the Hugging Face Hub (nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_*)
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and the Outputs they generate are licensed separately under the nyra health
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Non-Commercial Research License; see the LICENSE.md in each model repository.
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Metadata-Version: 2.4
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Name: nyra-forced-aligner
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Version: 0.2.1
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Summary: Verbatim-aware, noise-robust forced alignment: precise word and phone timestamps for conversational speech, including fillers and vocal sounds
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Author: nyra health GmbH
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License: MIT
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Project-URL: Homepage, https://nyra-labs.com/research/nyra-forced-aligner
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Project-URL: Repository, https://github.com/nyrahealth/nyra-forced-aligner
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Project-URL: Models, https://huggingface.co/nyralabs
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Keywords: forced alignment,speech,word timestamps,phonetics,disfluency,wavlm
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Classifier: Development Status :: 4 - Beta
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Classifier: Intended Audience :: Developers
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Classifier: Intended Audience :: Science/Research
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Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License
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Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3
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Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3.10
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Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3.11
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Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12
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Classifier: Topic :: Scientific/Engineering :: Artificial Intelligence
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Classifier: Topic :: Multimedia :: Sound/Audio :: Speech
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Requires-Python: >=3.10
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Description-Content-Type: text/markdown
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License-File: LICENSE
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Requires-Dist: numpy>=1.24
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Requires-Dist: torch>=2.0
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Requires-Dist: soundfile>=0.12
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Requires-Dist: soxr>=0.3
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Requires-Dist: transformers>=4.40
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Requires-Dist: huggingface_hub>=0.20
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Requires-Dist: phonemizer>=3.2
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Requires-Dist: numba>=0.58
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Requires-Dist: tqdm
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Provides-Extra: dev
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Requires-Dist: pytest; extra == "dev"
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Dynamic: license-file
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# nyra-forced-aligner
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[](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs)
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**The most accurate word timing you can get for conversational speech:
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verbatim-aware, noise-robust, and fast.**
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[Blog post](https://nyra-labs.com/research/nyra-forced-aligner) ·
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[Paper](#) <!-- TODO: ICASSP 2026 link --> ·
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[Models](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs) ·
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[CrisperWhisper](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper)
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A forced aligner answers one question: given a recording and its transcript,
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*when* was each word said? Most aligners were built for read speech and clean
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audio, and they quietly fall apart on the material people actually need to
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align: conversations full of `um`s, laughter, restarts and half-finished words,
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recorded in rooms that are not studios.
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`nyra-forced-aligner` was built for exactly that material.
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- **Vocal sounds are alignable.** Fillers (`[UH]`, `[UM]`), laughter, breaths,
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coughs and word cut-offs (`th-`) are units of the model like any phone,
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so they get timestamps of their own instead of being smeared into the
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neighbouring words.
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- **Made for CrisperWhisper transcripts.** Trained on the verbatim
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transcription convention of
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[CrisperWhisper 2.0](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper): feed
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its output straight in and every filler, repetition and event token is
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aligned.
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- **Accurate where it matters.** 19.9 ms mean word-boundary error on
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conversational English (Buckeye): 21% lower than the best configuration of
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the Montreal Forced Aligner, half the error of the best ASR-with-timestamps
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system, and the only system whose error tail drops below 1% of words before
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100 ms.
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- **Noise-robust.** Every utterance stays aligned down to 0 dB SNR, where
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classical aligners lose or mangle most of them. A Pro model goes further for
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difficult recordings.
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- **Fast and longform.** Batched WavLM features, GPU emissions and a compiled
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beam Viterbi: eight minutes of audio align in about three seconds on one
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GPU.
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## Install
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```bash
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pip install nyra-forced-aligner
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# espeak-ng is needed to pronounce words outside the built-in 41k-word lexicon:
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# apt install espeak-ng (macOS: brew install espeak-ng)
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```
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Runs on CPU, but a CUDA GPU is strongly recommended (WavLM-large front-end).
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The model is downloaded from the Hugging Face Hub on first use.
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## Quickstart
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```python
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from nyra_align import Aligner
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aligner = Aligner() # nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en
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# aligner = Aligner(pro=True) # noise-robust model
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result = aligner.align("interview.wav",
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"so i [UM] i went there on on thursday [laughter]")
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for w in result.words:
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print(f"{w.start:7.3f} {w.end:7.3f} {w.word:<12s} {w.type}") # w / f(iller) / s(ound) / c(ut-off)
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result.to_textgrid("interview.TextGrid") # Praat
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result.to_json("interview.json")
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```
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Any audio length works. For the best timings follow the
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[transcript conventions](#transcript-conventions) below.
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Command line, single file or a whole corpus of paired `.wav` + `.txt`/`.lab`
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files (MFA-style layout):
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```bash
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nyra-align interview.wav --text-file interview.txt --out interview.TextGrid
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nyra-align corpus_dir/ --pro --out-dir aligned/ --format textgrid
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```
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### Transcript conventions
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The aligner can only place what the transcript contains, so for the best
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timings the transcript should be **verbatim: write what you hear.**
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- **Cut-offs.** Interrupted words and word fragments are marked with a
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trailing hyphen: `th-`, `w-`, `resched-`.
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- **Fillers.** Filled pauses are bracketed and upper-cased: `[UH]`, `[UM]`.
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- **Vocal sound events.** Non-speech sounds are bracketed: `[laughter]`,
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`[cough]`, `[breath]`, `[sigh]`, `[sniff]`, `[lipsmack]`,
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`[throatclearing]`, `[yawn]`, `[noise]`.
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- **Numbers, dates, times and emails** are written out exactly as spoken
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(`March third at nine thirty`), not as digits or symbols.
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- **Everything else** is transcribed word for word. Normal casing and
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punctuation are fine (the aligner ignores both); repetitions, false starts,
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fillers, fragments and sounds are all left in place.
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```text
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so we we need to, to reschedule the th- Thursday meeting to [UH] March third at nine thirty [laughter]
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```
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What happens when a transcript deviates: a word that was spoken but is missing
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from the transcript gets absorbed into its neighbours, and a word in the
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transcript that was never spoken is squeezed into a few frames, so both shift
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the surrounding boundaries. Event tags are matched in any casing; a tag the
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model does not know (`[music]`) is left out and listed in `result.skipped`,
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as is any token that cannot be pronounced.
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### With CrisperWhisper 2.0
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[CrisperWhisper 2.0](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper) produces
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transcripts in exactly this convention, so its verbatim output can be aligned
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as is:
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```python
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from crisperwhisper import CrisperWhisperModel
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from nyra_align import Aligner
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audio = "interview.wav"
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transcript = CrisperWhisperModel("large").transcribe(audio, language="en").text
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result = Aligner().align(audio, transcript)
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for w in result.words:
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print(f"{w.start:7.3f} {w.end:7.3f} {w.word}")
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result.to_textgrid("interview.TextGrid")
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```
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### Models
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| Shorthand | Hugging Face ID | Use it for |
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|-----------|-----------------|------------|
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| `Aligner()` (default) | `nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en` | Clean and lightly noisy audio; most accurate on clean speech |
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| `Aligner(pro=True)` | `nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en_pro` | **Pro**: roughly the same accuracy on clean speech, meaningfully more robust to noise and adverse acoustic conditions. Not publicly released; available on request |
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Only English is available at the moment; `Aligner(language="de")` raises
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`NotImplementedError`.
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## Performance
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Mean absolute word-boundary error on **Buckeye** (conversational English,
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2,008 test recordings, 80,475 words), lower is better. Every system is scored
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with the same protocol: DP word matching on canonicalized forms, laughter
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tokens excluded, MAE = mean over words of (|onset error| + |offset error|)/2.
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| # | System | Type | MAE (ms) | MedAE | ≤25 ms | ≤50 ms | ≤100 ms | mIoU |
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|--:|--------|------|---------:|------:|-------:|-------:|--------:|-----:|
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| 1 | **nyra_forced_aligner_en** | forced aligner | **19.9** | 13.9 | **79.5%** | **93.7%** | **98.3%** | **0.830** |
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| 2 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, wide beam¹ | forced aligner | 25.3 | 13.0 | 76.7% | 92.2% | 97.3% | 0.826 |
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| 3 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_mfa`, wide beam¹ | forced aligner | 35.6 | 15.0 | 71.3% | 87.5% | 95.2% | 0.790 |
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| 4 | CrisperWhisper 2.0 | ASR | 38.7 | 25.0 | 54.2% | 78.7% | 91.7% | 0.717 |
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| 5 | Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B | forced aligner | 39.5 | 25.0 | 52.8% | 85.9% | 96.6% | 0.711 |
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| 6 | xAI Grok Speech-to-Text | ASR | 45.5 | 34.5 | 58.3% | 82.8% | 94.0% | 0.630 |
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| 7 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, default beam | forced aligner | 48.0 | 13.5 | 75.2% | 90.4% | 95.6% | 0.810 |
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| 8 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_mfa`, default beam | forced aligner | 48.9 | 15.5 | 70.7% | 86.7% | 94.3% | 0.782 |
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| 9 | MMS-FA (torchaudio) | forced aligner | 53.0 | 34.9 | 57.5% | 81.3% | 92.8% | 0.620 |
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| 10 | ElevenLabs Scribe v2 | ASR | 57.8 | 50.0 | 47.6% | 75.8% | 94.8% | 0.540 |
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| 11 | Charsiu | forced aligner | 70.3 | 28.0 | 51.8% | 68.5% | 85.1% | 0.649 |
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| 12 | NeMo Forced Aligner | forced aligner | 72.6 | 62.5 | 26.8% | 49.8% | 79.3% | 0.443 |
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| 13 | WhisperX (wav2vec2 alignment) | forced aligner | 80.9 | 61.5 | 35.1% | 68.1% | 94.1% | 0.456 |
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| 14 | CTC-Segmentation | forced aligner | 81.0 | 36.0 | 41.5% | 69.5% | 89.3% | 0.635 |
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| 15 | Deepgram Nova-3 | ASR | 86.9 | 71.0 | 18.1% | 36.4% | 68.9% | 0.496 |
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| 16 | Cartesia Ink-Whisper | ASR | 124.8 | 46.3 | 36.0% | 60.4% | 82.8% | 0.598 |
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<sub>**MAE** and **MedAE** are over the per-word error (|onset error| +
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|offset error|)/2. The **≤ t ms** columns follow the convention of Rousso et
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al. (2024): the share of words whose *end* timestamp is within t of the
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reference (one boundary, not the per-word mean). **Forced aligners** are given
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the reference words and only predict their timing; every word is scored. **ASR** systems produce their own words, which
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are text-aligned to the reference, and only matched words are scored
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(88–93% of words), so their timing is judged independently of their
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transcription errors. ¹ MFA's shipped default beam (10) prunes the correct
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path on conversational speech; the "wide beam" rows use `beam 400 / retry
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4000`, the best configuration we found for it.</sub>
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The mean hides where the difference really is. Averaged over all words, most
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systems are within a few tens of milliseconds; the gap is in the **tail**, the
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use. Each curve shows the share of words whose per-word error (mean of the
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onset and offset errors, the quantity behind MAE) is larger than *t*; note
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this is not the single-boundary ≤ t ms column of the table:
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20 dB down to 0 dB (MAE in ms). MUSAN is real noise recordings; Gaussian is
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white noise, which the model never saw in training.
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| System | MUSAN 20 | 10 | 5 | 0 dB | Gauss 20 | 10 | 5 | 0 dB |
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| **nyra_forced_aligner_en** | 20.0 | 22.2 | 26.9 | 56.3 | 20.2 | 25.3 | 38.9 | 110.9 |
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| CrisperWhisper 2.0² | 38.7 | 42.4 | 48.0 | 55.7 | 40.1 | 50.9 | 67.3 | 103.4 |
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| Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B | 40.6 | 54.3 | 78.7 | 153.9 | 43.4 | 85.2 | 153.9 | 339.2 |
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| MMS-FA (torchaudio) | 52.8 | 54.9 | 57.7 | 67.0 | 52.0 | 55.2 | 61.0 | 86.1 |
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| Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, wide beam | 33.3 | 65.3 | 127.2 | 281.2 | 36.2 | 74.4 | 156.3 | 416.9 |
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| WhisperX (wav2vec2 alignment) | 81.7 | 90.4 | 138.1 | 468.5 | 84.2 | 126.3 | 415.2 | 2720.6 |
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<sub>² CrisperWhisper 2.0 is an ASR system: at 0 dB it still recognises only
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29% of the words, and only those are scored. All forced aligners above keep
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100% of words at every SNR.</sub>
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`nyra_forced_aligner_en_pro` delivers roughly the same accuracy on clean speech
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and is meaningfully more robust to noise and adverse acoustic conditions.
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Results on read speech (TIMIT) and stuttered speech (FluencyBank), the full
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set of ablations, and how the models are trained are in the paper.
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## What else is in the box
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| `Aligner(pro=True)` | Noise-robust model |
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| `Aligner(device="cuda" / "cpu")` | Device selection (auto by default) |
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| `Aligner(precision="fp32")` | WavLM in fp32 instead of fp16; bit-exact parity with the reference implementation (fp16 moves ≤30 ms on ~0.5% of word boundaries) |
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| `Aligner(wavlm_batch=16)` | Batch size for the 30 s WavLM windows on long audio (tune to VRAM) |
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| `aligner.align_features(feats, text)` | Re-align a transcript against cached features (decode is ~6 ms per 3.5 s utterance) |
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| `result.events` | Just the filler / laughter / cut-off tokens |
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| `result.silences` | Silence segments between words |
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## How it works
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The full story is in the deep-dive post:
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- [The nyra forced aligner: precise word timing for real conversational speech](https://nyra-labs.com/research/nyra-forced-aligner).
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Why classical aligners break on spontaneous and noisy speech, how frozen
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WavLM features, vocal-event units and a noise-pooled projection fix it, and
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how the model bootstraps itself from verbatim transcripts without any
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manual boundary labels.
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In short: WavLM-large hidden states are projected by a supervised LDA onto 40
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dimensions and modelled by a triphone GMM-HMM whose inventory holds 15
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vocal-event units next to the 39 English phones. At inference the package
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builds the alignment graph for the transcript (optional silence between words,
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full context across word boundaries) and runs a compiled beam Viterbi over the
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model's likelihoods, with a beam ladder so that no utterance is ever silently
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dropped. Words outside the built-in lexicon are phonemized with espeak through
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the same mapping used at training time.
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## License
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The model files are released under the
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[nyra health Non-Commercial Research License](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en/blob/main/LICENSE.md):
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free for research and other non-commercial use. This license covers the
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model **and the alignments it produces**: any commercial use of the
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timestamps, and any use of them to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve
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models intended for commercial use, requires a commercial license. The Pro
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model is available under commercial license only. For commercial licensing
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of either, [contact nyra health](mailto:licensing@nyra-labs.com).
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The model repositories bundle Microsoft's WavLM-large weights, redistributed
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unchanged under their upstream license.
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# nyra-forced-aligner
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[](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs)
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**The most accurate word timing you can get for conversational speech:
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verbatim-aware, noise-robust, and fast.**
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+
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[Blog post](https://nyra-labs.com/research/nyra-forced-aligner) ·
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[Paper](#) <!-- TODO: ICASSP 2026 link --> ·
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[Models](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs) ·
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[CrisperWhisper](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper)
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+
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A forced aligner answers one question: given a recording and its transcript,
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*when* was each word said? Most aligners were built for read speech and clean
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15
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audio, and they quietly fall apart on the material people actually need to
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align: conversations full of `um`s, laughter, restarts and half-finished words,
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recorded in rooms that are not studios.
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+
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`nyra-forced-aligner` was built for exactly that material.
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- **Vocal sounds are alignable.** Fillers (`[UH]`, `[UM]`), laughter, breaths,
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coughs and word cut-offs (`th-`) are units of the model like any phone,
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so they get timestamps of their own instead of being smeared into the
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neighbouring words.
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- **Made for CrisperWhisper transcripts.** Trained on the verbatim
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transcription convention of
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[CrisperWhisper 2.0](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper): feed
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its output straight in and every filler, repetition and event token is
|
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aligned.
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+
- **Accurate where it matters.** 19.9 ms mean word-boundary error on
|
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|
+
conversational English (Buckeye): 21% lower than the best configuration of
|
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|
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the Montreal Forced Aligner, half the error of the best ASR-with-timestamps
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system, and the only system whose error tail drops below 1% of words before
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100 ms.
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- **Noise-robust.** Every utterance stays aligned down to 0 dB SNR, where
|
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classical aligners lose or mangle most of them. A Pro model goes further for
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difficult recordings.
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- **Fast and longform.** Batched WavLM features, GPU emissions and a compiled
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beam Viterbi: eight minutes of audio align in about three seconds on one
|
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GPU.
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+
|
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+
## Install
|
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+
|
|
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|
+
```bash
|
|
45
|
+
pip install nyra-forced-aligner
|
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46
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+
|
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# espeak-ng is needed to pronounce words outside the built-in 41k-word lexicon:
|
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+
# apt install espeak-ng (macOS: brew install espeak-ng)
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+
```
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+
|
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+
Runs on CPU, but a CUDA GPU is strongly recommended (WavLM-large front-end).
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The model is downloaded from the Hugging Face Hub on first use.
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## Quickstart
|
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+
|
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|
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```python
|
|
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from nyra_align import Aligner
|
|
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|
+
|
|
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|
+
aligner = Aligner() # nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en
|
|
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|
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# aligner = Aligner(pro=True) # noise-robust model
|
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+
|
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result = aligner.align("interview.wav",
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|
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"so i [UM] i went there on on thursday [laughter]")
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|
+
|
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|
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for w in result.words:
|
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|
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print(f"{w.start:7.3f} {w.end:7.3f} {w.word:<12s} {w.type}") # w / f(iller) / s(ound) / c(ut-off)
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+
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result.to_textgrid("interview.TextGrid") # Praat
|
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result.to_json("interview.json")
|
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```
|
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+
|
|
72
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Any audio length works. For the best timings follow the
|
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[transcript conventions](#transcript-conventions) below.
|
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+
|
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+
Command line, single file or a whole corpus of paired `.wav` + `.txt`/`.lab`
|
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files (MFA-style layout):
|
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+
|
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|
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```bash
|
|
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nyra-align interview.wav --text-file interview.txt --out interview.TextGrid
|
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|
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nyra-align corpus_dir/ --pro --out-dir aligned/ --format textgrid
|
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|
+
```
|
|
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|
+
|
|
83
|
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### Transcript conventions
|
|
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|
+
|
|
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|
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The aligner can only place what the transcript contains, so for the best
|
|
86
|
+
timings the transcript should be **verbatim: write what you hear.**
|
|
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|
+
|
|
88
|
+
- **Cut-offs.** Interrupted words and word fragments are marked with a
|
|
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|
+
trailing hyphen: `th-`, `w-`, `resched-`.
|
|
90
|
+
- **Fillers.** Filled pauses are bracketed and upper-cased: `[UH]`, `[UM]`.
|
|
91
|
+
- **Vocal sound events.** Non-speech sounds are bracketed: `[laughter]`,
|
|
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|
+
`[cough]`, `[breath]`, `[sigh]`, `[sniff]`, `[lipsmack]`,
|
|
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|
+
`[throatclearing]`, `[yawn]`, `[noise]`.
|
|
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|
+
- **Numbers, dates, times and emails** are written out exactly as spoken
|
|
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|
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(`March third at nine thirty`), not as digits or symbols.
|
|
96
|
+
- **Everything else** is transcribed word for word. Normal casing and
|
|
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|
+
punctuation are fine (the aligner ignores both); repetitions, false starts,
|
|
98
|
+
fillers, fragments and sounds are all left in place.
|
|
99
|
+
|
|
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|
+
```text
|
|
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+
so we we need to, to reschedule the th- Thursday meeting to [UH] March third at nine thirty [laughter]
|
|
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|
+
```
|
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|
+
|
|
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+
What happens when a transcript deviates: a word that was spoken but is missing
|
|
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|
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from the transcript gets absorbed into its neighbours, and a word in the
|
|
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|
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transcript that was never spoken is squeezed into a few frames, so both shift
|
|
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|
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the surrounding boundaries. Event tags are matched in any casing; a tag the
|
|
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|
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model does not know (`[music]`) is left out and listed in `result.skipped`,
|
|
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|
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as is any token that cannot be pronounced.
|
|
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|
+
|
|
111
|
+
### With CrisperWhisper 2.0
|
|
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|
+
|
|
113
|
+
[CrisperWhisper 2.0](https://github.com/nyrahealth/CrisperWhisper) produces
|
|
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|
+
transcripts in exactly this convention, so its verbatim output can be aligned
|
|
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|
+
as is:
|
|
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|
+
|
|
117
|
+
```python
|
|
118
|
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from crisperwhisper import CrisperWhisperModel
|
|
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|
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from nyra_align import Aligner
|
|
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|
+
|
|
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|
+
audio = "interview.wav"
|
|
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|
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transcript = CrisperWhisperModel("large").transcribe(audio, language="en").text
|
|
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+
result = Aligner().align(audio, transcript)
|
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|
+
|
|
125
|
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for w in result.words:
|
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|
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print(f"{w.start:7.3f} {w.end:7.3f} {w.word}")
|
|
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|
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result.to_textgrid("interview.TextGrid")
|
|
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|
+
```
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+
|
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### Models
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|
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| Shorthand | Hugging Face ID | Use it for |
|
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|-----------|-----------------|------------|
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| `Aligner()` (default) | `nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en` | Clean and lightly noisy audio; most accurate on clean speech |
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| `Aligner(pro=True)` | `nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en_pro` | **Pro**: roughly the same accuracy on clean speech, meaningfully more robust to noise and adverse acoustic conditions. Not publicly released; available on request |
|
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+
|
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Only English is available at the moment; `Aligner(language="de")` raises
|
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`NotImplementedError`.
|
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+
|
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## Performance
|
|
141
|
+
|
|
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|
+
Mean absolute word-boundary error on **Buckeye** (conversational English,
|
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|
+
2,008 test recordings, 80,475 words), lower is better. Every system is scored
|
|
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|
+
with the same protocol: DP word matching on canonicalized forms, laughter
|
|
145
|
+
tokens excluded, MAE = mean over words of (|onset error| + |offset error|)/2.
|
|
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+
|
|
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+
| # | System | Type | MAE (ms) | MedAE | ≤25 ms | ≤50 ms | ≤100 ms | mIoU |
|
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|
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|--:|--------|------|---------:|------:|-------:|-------:|--------:|-----:|
|
|
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|
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| 1 | **nyra_forced_aligner_en** | forced aligner | **19.9** | 13.9 | **79.5%** | **93.7%** | **98.3%** | **0.830** |
|
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| 2 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, wide beam¹ | forced aligner | 25.3 | 13.0 | 76.7% | 92.2% | 97.3% | 0.826 |
|
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|
+
| 3 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_mfa`, wide beam¹ | forced aligner | 35.6 | 15.0 | 71.3% | 87.5% | 95.2% | 0.790 |
|
|
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|
+
| 4 | CrisperWhisper 2.0 | ASR | 38.7 | 25.0 | 54.2% | 78.7% | 91.7% | 0.717 |
|
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+
| 5 | Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B | forced aligner | 39.5 | 25.0 | 52.8% | 85.9% | 96.6% | 0.711 |
|
|
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|
+
| 6 | xAI Grok Speech-to-Text | ASR | 45.5 | 34.5 | 58.3% | 82.8% | 94.0% | 0.630 |
|
|
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|
+
| 7 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, default beam | forced aligner | 48.0 | 13.5 | 75.2% | 90.4% | 95.6% | 0.810 |
|
|
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|
+
| 8 | Montreal Forced Aligner `english_mfa`, default beam | forced aligner | 48.9 | 15.5 | 70.7% | 86.7% | 94.3% | 0.782 |
|
|
157
|
+
| 9 | MMS-FA (torchaudio) | forced aligner | 53.0 | 34.9 | 57.5% | 81.3% | 92.8% | 0.620 |
|
|
158
|
+
| 10 | ElevenLabs Scribe v2 | ASR | 57.8 | 50.0 | 47.6% | 75.8% | 94.8% | 0.540 |
|
|
159
|
+
| 11 | Charsiu | forced aligner | 70.3 | 28.0 | 51.8% | 68.5% | 85.1% | 0.649 |
|
|
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|
+
| 12 | NeMo Forced Aligner | forced aligner | 72.6 | 62.5 | 26.8% | 49.8% | 79.3% | 0.443 |
|
|
161
|
+
| 13 | WhisperX (wav2vec2 alignment) | forced aligner | 80.9 | 61.5 | 35.1% | 68.1% | 94.1% | 0.456 |
|
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+
| 14 | CTC-Segmentation | forced aligner | 81.0 | 36.0 | 41.5% | 69.5% | 89.3% | 0.635 |
|
|
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|
+
| 15 | Deepgram Nova-3 | ASR | 86.9 | 71.0 | 18.1% | 36.4% | 68.9% | 0.496 |
|
|
164
|
+
| 16 | Cartesia Ink-Whisper | ASR | 124.8 | 46.3 | 36.0% | 60.4% | 82.8% | 0.598 |
|
|
165
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+
|
|
166
|
+
<sub>**MAE** and **MedAE** are over the per-word error (|onset error| +
|
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167
|
+
|offset error|)/2. The **≤ t ms** columns follow the convention of Rousso et
|
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+
al. (2024): the share of words whose *end* timestamp is within t of the
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+
reference (one boundary, not the per-word mean). **Forced aligners** are given
|
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170
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+
the reference words and only predict their timing; every word is scored. **ASR** systems produce their own words, which
|
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are text-aligned to the reference, and only matched words are scored
|
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(88–93% of words), so their timing is judged independently of their
|
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+
transcription errors. ¹ MFA's shipped default beam (10) prunes the correct
|
|
174
|
+
path on conversational speech; the "wide beam" rows use `beam 400 / retry
|
|
175
|
+
4000`, the best configuration we found for it.</sub>
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|
176
|
+
|
|
177
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+
The mean hides where the difference really is. Averaged over all words, most
|
|
178
|
+
systems are within a few tens of milliseconds; the gap is in the **tail**, the
|
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179
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+
words that are misaligned by 100 ms or more, which is what breaks downstream
|
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+
use. Each curve shows the share of words whose per-word error (mean of the
|
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onset and offset errors, the quantity behind MAE) is larger than *t*; note
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this is not the single-boundary ≤ t ms column of the table:
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### Under noise
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The same Buckeye recordings with added noise, at signal-to-noise ratios from
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20 dB down to 0 dB (MAE in ms). MUSAN is real noise recordings; Gaussian is
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white noise, which the model never saw in training.
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| System | MUSAN 20 | 10 | 5 | 0 dB | Gauss 20 | 10 | 5 | 0 dB |
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|--------|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
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| **nyra_forced_aligner_en** | 20.0 | 22.2 | 26.9 | 56.3 | 20.2 | 25.3 | 38.9 | 110.9 |
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| CrisperWhisper 2.0² | 38.7 | 42.4 | 48.0 | 55.7 | 40.1 | 50.9 | 67.3 | 103.4 |
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| Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B | 40.6 | 54.3 | 78.7 | 153.9 | 43.4 | 85.2 | 153.9 | 339.2 |
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| MMS-FA (torchaudio) | 52.8 | 54.9 | 57.7 | 67.0 | 52.0 | 55.2 | 61.0 | 86.1 |
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| Montreal Forced Aligner `english_us_arpa`, wide beam | 33.3 | 65.3 | 127.2 | 281.2 | 36.2 | 74.4 | 156.3 | 416.9 |
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| WhisperX (wav2vec2 alignment) | 81.7 | 90.4 | 138.1 | 468.5 | 84.2 | 126.3 | 415.2 | 2720.6 |
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<sub>² CrisperWhisper 2.0 is an ASR system: at 0 dB it still recognises only
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29% of the words, and only those are scored. All forced aligners above keep
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100% of words at every SNR.</sub>
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`nyra_forced_aligner_en_pro` delivers roughly the same accuracy on clean speech
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and is meaningfully more robust to noise and adverse acoustic conditions.
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Results on read speech (TIMIT) and stuttered speech (FluencyBank), the full
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set of ablations, and how the models are trained are in the paper.
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## What else is in the box
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| Option | What it does |
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|--------|--------------|
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| `Aligner(pro=True)` | Noise-robust model |
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| `Aligner(device="cuda" / "cpu")` | Device selection (auto by default) |
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| `Aligner(precision="fp32")` | WavLM in fp32 instead of fp16; bit-exact parity with the reference implementation (fp16 moves ≤30 ms on ~0.5% of word boundaries) |
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| `Aligner(wavlm_batch=16)` | Batch size for the 30 s WavLM windows on long audio (tune to VRAM) |
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| `aligner.align_features(feats, text)` | Re-align a transcript against cached features (decode is ~6 ms per 3.5 s utterance) |
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| `result.events` | Just the filler / laughter / cut-off tokens |
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| `result.silences` | Silence segments between words |
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## How it works
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The full story is in the deep-dive post:
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- [The nyra forced aligner: precise word timing for real conversational speech](https://nyra-labs.com/research/nyra-forced-aligner).
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Why classical aligners break on spontaneous and noisy speech, how frozen
|
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WavLM features, vocal-event units and a noise-pooled projection fix it, and
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how the model bootstraps itself from verbatim transcripts without any
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+
manual boundary labels.
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+
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In short: WavLM-large hidden states are projected by a supervised LDA onto 40
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dimensions and modelled by a triphone GMM-HMM whose inventory holds 15
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vocal-event units next to the 39 English phones. At inference the package
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builds the alignment graph for the transcript (optional silence between words,
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full context across word boundaries) and runs a compiled beam Viterbi over the
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model's likelihoods, with a beam ladder so that no utterance is ever silently
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dropped. Words outside the built-in lexicon are phonemized with espeak through
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the same mapping used at training time.
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+
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## License
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+
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The model files are released under the
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[nyra health Non-Commercial Research License](https://huggingface.co/nyralabs/nyra_forced_aligner_en/blob/main/LICENSE.md):
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free for research and other non-commercial use. This license covers the
|
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+
model **and the alignments it produces**: any commercial use of the
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timestamps, and any use of them to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve
|
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models intended for commercial use, requires a commercial license. The Pro
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model is available under commercial license only. For commercial licensing
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of either, [contact nyra health](mailto:licensing@nyra-labs.com).
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+
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The model repositories bundle Microsoft's WavLM-large weights, redistributed
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unchanged under their upstream license.
|
|
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
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|
|
1
|
+
"""nyra-align: verbatim-aware, noise-robust forced alignment without Kaldi.
|
|
2
|
+
|
|
3
|
+
from nyra_align import Aligner
|
|
4
|
+
aligner = Aligner() # English, published model, device auto
|
|
5
|
+
aligner = Aligner(pro=True) # noise-robust variant
|
|
6
|
+
result = aligner.align("audio.wav", "so i uhm [laughter] went there")
|
|
7
|
+
result.words # Word(word, start, end, type, phones)
|
|
8
|
+
result.to_textgrid("out.TextGrid")
|
|
9
|
+
"""
|
|
10
|
+
|
|
11
|
+
from .aligner import (DEFAULT_MODELS, SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES, Aligner,
|
|
12
|
+
resolve_model)
|
|
13
|
+
from .model import NyraModel
|
|
14
|
+
from .outputs import AlignmentResult, Phone, Word
|
|
15
|
+
|
|
16
|
+
from .version import __version__
|
|
17
|
+
__all__ = ["Aligner", "NyraModel", "AlignmentResult", "Word", "Phone",
|
|
18
|
+
"DEFAULT_MODELS", "SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES", "resolve_model"]
|