Introduction
Status: Current Book last changed: 2026-09-16 (commit 34d249d8) This page last changed: 2026-09-01 (commit bb0bb3c9)
TalkBank is the world’s largest open repository of spoken language data. This repository (talkbank-tools) is the Batchalign3 workspace: the machine-learning pipeline that turns audio into richly annotated CHAT transcripts (automatic speech recognition, forced alignment, neural morphosyntactic tagging, and utterance segmentation), together with its web dashboard and an experimental desktop app.
The CHAT-format core (the chatter CLI, the Rust CHAT parsing and validation crates, the tree-sitter-talkbank grammar, and the CLAN command reference) now lives in the separate chatter project and is documented in its own book. This book covers Batchalign3 only.
What Batchalign3 does
| Task | Surface | Support Status |
|---|---|---|
| Transcribe, align, or morphotag CHAT with audio and ML | batchalign3 CLI / server | 🔷 Public preview; wheels for Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Standalone desktop GUI for Batchalign | Batchalign Desktop (apps/dashboard-desktop/) | ⚠️ Experimental only; build from source |
Legend: 🔷 = Public preview, ⚠️ = Experimental (not supported for end-users).
Platform and support detail live in the repo-root docs/PLATFORM-SUPPORT.md and docs/RELEASE-CONTRACT.md.
Who this book is for
- Researchers and clinicians transcribing, aligning, or morphotagging audio into CHAT: start with the Batchalign3 User Guide.
- Users coming from Batchalign2: see the Migration Book.
- Contributors to the pipeline: see the Developer Guide.
For CHAT validation, normalization, conversion, or CLAN-style analysis without audio or ML, use the separate chatter project, which has its own CLI and documentation.
Repository layout
crates/ batchalign-* (runtime, types, PyO3 bridge); the CHAT-core talkbank-* crates are consumed from the chatter project
batchalign/ Python worker code (ML inference hosting)
apps/ Tauri v2 desktop app (dashboard-desktop, experimental)
frontend/ React dashboard for the Batchalign server
book/ This documentation (mdBook)
This page last changed: 2026-09-01 (commit bb0bb3c9). The whole book last changed: 2026-09-16 (commit 34d249d8).