Kenny Q. Zhu
Other people with similar names: Kenny Zhu
2026
Praat++: Multimedia Annotation System for Speech and Vocalization
Weiran Zhang | Kenny Q. Zhu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Weiran Zhang | Kenny Q. Zhu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
High-quality time-aligned annotation is fundamental to speech processing and animal vocalization research, yet precise boundary localization and consistent labeling remain challenging in collaborative settings. We present Praat++, a web-based multimedia annotation system designed for collaborative, video-informed, and AI-assisted timeline labeling of audio and video data. The system tightly synchronizes waveform, spectrogram, pitch, intensity, and time-aligned video playback with fine-grained region-based editing, enabling precise boundary refinement and improved label accuracy within a unified interface. Praat++ further incorporates role-aware workflow management and human-in-the-loop AI-assisted pre-annotation to enhance inter-annotator consistency and reduce labeling time. Through real-world multimodal speech and animal vocalization annotation scenarios, we demonstrate that Praat++ provides an integrated infrastructure for improving annotation quality and efficiency in dataset construction workflows. The demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YboCoBRF5lg), website (https://redgiant.uta.edu/praat) and source code (https://github.com/UTA-ACL2/PraatPlusPlus) are now publicly available.