ashSaid

ashSaid is a collaborative platform and project dedicated to recording, transcribing, and sharing spoken language. It aims to provide an accessible, open environment for researchers, educators, artists, and community members to engage with oral discourse while preserving provenance and consent.

The project centers on turning audio into text, with annotations and metadata to capture context, speaker role, dialect, emotion, and setting, when permission allows. It emphasizes transparency in data provenance and licensing to support reuse in research, education, and creative writing.

Core components include an audio repository, transcription tools (automatic and manual), annotation interfaces, and an export and API system. Content can be browsed by language, topic, or speaker attributes, and users can contribute through uploads, corrections, or moderation.

Governance is community-driven, with policies that encourage open licensing while respecting privacy and consent. Participating organizations and individuals may contribute code, funding, and content under terms designed to balance openness with user rights.

ashSaid is intended as a resource for linguistic research, language documentation, and cultural storytelling. It is used by academic researchers, language teachers, archivists, and artists seeking to explore spoken language in context. The project aims to be interoperable with existing data standards and to promote ethical considerations in collecting and sharing audio.