SPPAS: Scientific research software

SPPAS offers open source cross-platform, customizable automatic annotation and analysis solutions for audio and video media.

SPPAS was awarded by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation at the 2022 Open Source Research Software Competition.

Brigitte Bigi is the author of SPPAS: she's a computer scientist, researcher at Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France.

SPPAS is registered with the program protection agency under the reference IDDN.FR.001.500008.000.S.C.2024.000.31235

French Open Science Award
Honourable Mention for the 2022 Special Jury Prize

Screenshot of the award ceremony:
Brigitte Bigi, and Sylvie Retailleau - MESRI Minister

SPPAS enables easy and efficient access to a wide scope of customizable features:
annotate, analyze and manage files becomes available to everyone.

Annotate

SPPAS produces automatically annotations from a recorded audio and its orthographic transcription and/or from a video.

Analyze

SPPAS helps for the analysis of annotated files: statistics, requests, view and edit files to annotate manually.

Convert

SPPAS converts annotated files from/to a wide range of formats: xra, TextGrid, eaf, trs...

SPPAS 4.2: The Edit page with an audio file, a video file, the manual orthographic transcription and 2 automatic annotations.

Why should you trust SPPAS?

Because...

The SPPAS software tool is reliable: the application performs the features that the documentation described. It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways: in these situations, an error identifier with an error message is displayed. Its performances are good enough for the required uses cases, under the expected load and data volume.

SPPAS is installed on your computer: your corpus won't be transferred on the web. No statistics, no personal data are collected.

Its ongoing maintenance by the author: fixing bugs, keeping its systems operational, investigating failures, checking it on three platforms, modifying it for new use cases, adding new features and last but not least adding new language resources, updating the documentation and the website.

SPPAS is an open source package. You can edit the source code of the software tool, you can modify it, you can re-distribute it, etc.

Key Facts and Figures

Documentations:
- The SPPAS book: 160 pages
- The resources documentation: 60 pages
- The XRA file format: 15 pages
- The transcription convention: 5 pages

References: 30
- 19 about the annotations
- 4 about the software tool itself
- 3 about the linguistic resources construction
- 2 about the analyses
- 2 about the data representation

Cited 550+, including:
- cited by 190 references: SPPAS - Multi-lingual Approaches to the automatic Annotation of Speech
- cited by 135 references: SPPAS: a tool for the phonetic segmentations of Speech
- cited by 124 references: SPeech Phonetization Alignment and Syllabification (SPPAS): a tool for the automatic analysis...

Hot topics

2023-2028: Automatic Cued Speech

Result of the proof-of-concept of "Cued Speech automatic annotation" (SPPAS 4.3)

Orthographic transcription of the video

Cette vidéo est une démonstration de la génération automatique des clés LPC par le logiciel SPPAS.

Audio of the video

Cued speech keys generator was introduced the first time in version 3.9, August 2021. Then, a Proof of Concept (PoC) of an augmented reality system was firstly proposed in version 4.2. The PoC was turned into a stable version in SPPAS-4.22. This is part of a project funded by FIRAH.

Future work will take several directions, including but not limited to: performing statistical analyses of the CLeLfPC annotations (by 2025); adapting the system to American Cued Speech (by the end of 2025); and improving the system using methods based on machine learning and generative AI (starting from 2026 and beyond).

2025-2026: SPPAS Application Hub

The upcoming major version of SPPAS, i.e., version 5, expected by late 2025 or early 2026, will feature an exciting new interface that opens directly in your browser. This 'SPPAS Application Hub' will allow you to launch various applications: the Setup tool for installing new functionalities, the current interface for annotating and analyzing entire corpora, and exciting new features like automatic Cued Speech coding generation from a written text — and much more!