Voice messages for discourse

Is there any plugin that allows users to post voice subjects?
Is there anyone interested in such plugin?

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this may help: I remember @simon has worked on ā€œsound track uploadā€, but I couldn’t find it now via search.

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I think this is it?
https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugins-for-audio-file-uploads/36313

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If you enable audio filetypes for your forum, (mp3, ogg, wav, m4a) when audio files are uploaded, they should give you the browser’s default audio player.

Audio files are very large, so you would probably only want to enable them if you are storing uploads externally.

Edit: with the m4a filetype enabled, I can upload audio directly from my Android phones voice recorder app. That might be close to what you are looking for.

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Is there any way to limit the length of the audio to X seconds?
Do users record their voice or need to upload the files?

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No, but you can set the ā€˜max attachment size’ on Discourse to limit upload sizes. From my phone, a 1 minute audio recording is approximately 1000kb.

They need to upload the file. On my phone it is quite straightforward. Clicking the upload button in the composer opens the phone’s ā€˜Choose an action’ menu. That lets me select the phone’s voice recorder app.

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Following @simon’s suggestions, I get a player when a user uploads an audio file directly, but not when the audio file comes as an email attachment. In that case, a link to download the audio file is displayed. I’m testing Discourse as a ticketing system and our inboxes receive a good amount of voicemails to handle (forwarded from our phone line), so I’m interested in the player option when someone emails an audio file. Is there a way to configure this?

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Can you send an audio file as an email attachment here by replying to this via email so that we can have a look?

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I’ve tried to reply with an audio attachment but it appears that audio files are not authorized here ("authorized extensions: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, csv, gz, json, svg, mp4, txt, docx, mov, texā€).

Regardless, the same thing appears to happen with audio-only video files. Here is an .mp4 being sent as an email attachment.

Test audio recording.mp4 (44.1 KB)

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And here it is with the direct upload.

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Thanks @Elena_Lappen.

@gerhard, can you see if we can improve attachment_markdown to check if we can onebox the upload?

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I’m reviving this topic because I think voice messages are a big accessibility feature. I’m looking for

  • Voice recording
  • Accessible to those who are D/deaf and/or hard of hearing
  • So likely via automatic transcription
  • Translatable
  • Stored externally

We use VoiceText to do this on Slack, and it works very very well.

I’d love for it to be an option for Discourse, though! I don’t know how to necessarily get that to happen, but the workflow is just right.

For Discourse, perhaps an intermediary step is adding a button to the composer that opens a link to a voice recorder site. I’ve experimented with different voice recorders and here are some options. None of them are perfect, but would love to hear your feedback on this idea!

Otter.ai
Automatic transcription. Requires log-in and requires payment after 600 minutes/month (which is a lot, though!)

Reverb
Super simple to use. No log-in required. However, no automatic transcription.

SpeakPipe
Also super simple to use. No log-in required. No automatic transcription. 5 minute time limit per recording. Not as pretty as Reverb.

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I’d also be very interested in this feature inside of Discourse, the current workaround don’t look like anything my users would do because of the complications that some of my users may face.

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Hey guys

Picking this one up! This is a feature I am interested in since I want to primarily move communication to our staff to voice messages.

I tried Siri dictation, but it’s a nightmare (at least for German language). And I am on Firefox, hence Google Chrome Dictation is not an option.

Has anyone achieved something similar?

@debryc Have you figured out any native implementation with discourse? My dream scenario wiould be to use a service from within the editor so that the full transcript is embedded automatically in the post.

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@jrgong I’ve been tracking this too.

There is this Theme Component by @angus (which is currently broken)…

Also, there is a Plugin by @peter.be which is now working…

Theme Components are usually better and more flexible, so @angus Theme Component is probably the best solution! Maybe we could chip in to pay one of the developers to fix the Theme Component.

@jrgong there is also this, which is actually really cool and stable open source… which I might consider packaging as a theme component.

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Soundcite looks interesting due to open-source nature :slight_smile:
next step would be obviously to embed it natively into Discourse posts.

Yep, send me PM, I am interested :slight_smile:

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