OK guys, this is a weird one. Has anyone ever heard of a piece of "security" software that you can install on a Mac that will "wake up" when activity is heard in a room and start recording what it hears?
Here's the context … a client of mine says he installed such software on his Mac and that software "woke up" in the middle of the night after business hours and recorded the voices of people up to no good in his office. The weird thing is the "recordings" are not actual voices, they are mechanical-voice transcripts. I found the "recording" files while doing a forensics exam on the Mac. The files are in .wmv format with filenames like "August 8, 2008.wmv". When you play the wmv files you hear mechanical renderings of what are apparently recorded voices. You just see a black screen but with a textual transcript playing along the bottom of what the voices are saying. If anyone would like to see/hear one of these files, I would be happy to send one along in an email. Just ask.
We have every reason in the world to doubt the story that this client is telling us. He's a documented liar and all-around bad guy. But if there's any chance that he's telling the truth here and these .wmv files really do represent recordings of actual people behaving badly in this person's office after hours, then this could be very significant both in civil and criminal court. I just can't find any software around that does this, the client "doesn't remember" what software he used and the software is no longer on the Mac The .wmv files are still on the Mac but that's it.
I anyone has heard of something like this, please let me know. Thanks! Again, anyone can send me an email and I'll send back a sample of one of these wmv files. Thanks All!
Robert Kelso
Forensic Pursuit
robert.kelso@forensicpursuit.com
303-495-2082
Firstly and completely off topic let me just say that as a huge "Scrubs" fan your name brought a smile to my face )
Now that's out of the way, back on topic.
I've never heard of a software that would do that. It seems completely illogical that a piece of software would record actual human voices, then convert them to what I assume is like the Microsoft Sam type voices along with a transcript.
There are however plenty of pieces of software out there that you can type text and have it converted to voice with the accompanying transcript. 😉
I'd be looking at the files themselves, is there any information inside the file meta data which might point to the software that was used to create them? If you get a software name it should be easy to find the software and test it's capability.
OK guys, this is a weird one. Has anyone ever heard of a piece of "security" software that you can install on a Mac that will "wake up" when activity is heard in a room and start recording what it hears?
Doesn't sound completely impossible. If I ignore the 'wake up' part, it sounds like any monitoring software that checks video and/or audio streams for movement/sounde, and when it detects some, saves that part of both streams. In this case, the video stream would either be disconnected or badly configured. The output of such program may give the impression that the software had indeed 'woken up', when in reality it had only recorded those things that could be distinguished from random noise in video/audio channels.
However, i would expect the output of such programs to pinpoint time exactly. A file would probably not be called 'August 8, 2008.wmv', it would be something like '1000 PM – 1005 PM August 8, 2008.vmw', or there would be very strong, absolute internal time indicators. In professional software, I would expect additional log files, or even digitally signed output.
The synthesized speech seems quite difficult to explain. While I would agree there may be a technical possibility to go from an audio recording to a transcription of that audio, and from there to a synthesized voice rendering, I would not expect the latter step to be present in any kind of security software. And I would not expect any voice transcriber to be 100% perfect – there should be fluff of various kind, e.g. 'how to wreck a nice beach'-type mistranscriptions. If there is none, the transcription is likely to have been selective (or even edited), and whatever you see as transcription is whatever passed through that filter or editing process.
On the face of it, the story sounds difficult to believe.
I've also not heard of any software that will do as you said, but will just point out that OSX has text-to-voice built in, with a number of possible 'voices' (think the US female and UK male versions of Siri) to choose from.
I would also do a quick syntactical/grammatical check.
When you read an actual transcript made by "reversing a tape" you will often find a lot of "<missing>" "<not understandable> or [some word?] etc., the actual sentences will not be all "properly" formulated, some will have missing subjects, or verbs, some "slang" and consider how most of them are "human-interpreted" (by an experienced professional) and corrected for syntax/grammar and "sense".
An automated machine, especially if recording "room conversations" through a tiny mic of a laptop would have several garbled sentences, people don't normally talk clearly and in the direction of the microphone even when asked to, and if you ever used a transcription/voice activated software (Dragon Naturally Speaking to name one) you would know how clearly you need to speak (and which kind of "training" you have to do with the software) before having satisfying result).
So, such a software may well exist, but IMHO the result it would provide would be - for a recording in the conditions described - of extremely poor quality, with a lot of garbage, gaps and what not.
Additionally, at least all the tools of similar nature I have seen have as "input" an audio file (or stream through the mic) and output some form of text.
Of course you can then feed the text transcript to a "computer reader" and record the .wav, but it would make little sense, unless it is for someone who is visually impaired.
What you describe sounds more like a subtitled audio (or video) recording, there are tools, but they all have the same accurateness issues mentioned above, see (example)
https://
Of the Commercial softwares for Mac one of the best is considered this one
http//
but like most others it is more about "dictation", and
Transcribed audio must be of a single speaker's dictation in one of these file formats .wav, .aif, .aiff, .m4v, .mp4, or .m4a
jaclaz