Running MFA in server mode

[victoryhb]

Hi creators of MFA! First thank you very much for creating such an excellent tool for forced alignment, with a better feature set and trainability than comparable tools like Gentle. I am trying to integrate MFA into one of our online services and have the following questions:

1. How likely is MFA going to be maintained in the next couple of years?
2. Currently the tool is mainly used via the command line interface with noticeable startup time for each run, which renders it un-optimal for real-time alignment tasks (e.g. where the speaker makes a recording in the browser to be aligned in real time on the server). I wonder if MFA can be run as a server listening on a certain port (like what Gentle is doing)?
3. Are there any examples on how to use the tool programmatically in Python (not via CLI)?

Thank you very much in advance! Victor

[mmcauliffe]

Hi Victor, thanks for the suggestions and feedback! MFA should be maintained in some form for the next three years at least. This summer has been more focused on other projects, but I should have some time this fall to work more on the next release, and there should be some other projects in the lab this next year to expand functionality.

In terms of other ways of interacting with MFA than its CLI, we haven't discussed too much internally, but I do have python scripts that I've used for other projects (i. e., https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/MFA-reorganization-scripts/blob/master/Vietnamese/aligning.py, or the benchmarking/training scripts https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/benchmarking/tree/master/MFA), since that's generally how I use MFA, but they're typically not as clean as I would like. Further documenting MFA's subparts and writing up better documentation and use of the internals is definitely something that I would like to do.

[victoryhb]

Thank you very much for the detailed reply! I will continue to use MFA and keep a close watch on its updates and hopefully could contribute to it in some way as a user or developer.

Best, Victor

[veltzerdoron]

Is this available in the latest update?

And on that note... Is there a documented way to use the aligner in a non command line mode?