Dear
friends of DARLA,
(1) Our DARLA system ran into a technical bump in mid-July
2026. The DARLA system has been hosted here at Dartmouth
since 2015, but the Dartmouth IT security team notified us that
DARLA can't be a public-facing tool anymore. There has been no
security breach in DARLA. However, DARLA's code is 11 years old,
and the world out there has lots of new AI hacking risks, etc.
Since DARLA receives online uploads from users via a public
platform, security is an institutional concern. We apologize
for the inconvenience, but we just have no control over these
policies. DARLA is no longer
available publicly. Please contact me at James.N.Stanford@Dartmouth.edu
if you need more information about any of this. My postdoc
Sravana Reddy built DARLA in 2015, and the DARLA system was a
very useful tool at the time. But 11 years is an eternity in
tech years, and there are now much newer, better systems
available for vowel extraction.
We recommend VoxHumana, built by Joey Stanley and available
here: https://stanley.byu.edu/VoxHumana/
VoxHumana uses "New FAVE" (designed by Joe Fruehwald), which has
better vowel formant extractions (FastTrack) than the system we
have in DARLA (which uses "old FAVE Extract" from 2015).
VoxHumana is a user-friendly online uploading system much like
DARLA, where you can upload audio files and get alignments and
vowel formant extractions. It also offers Whisper automatic
transcriptions, and also it has additional post-processing steps
like normalization options and vowel plotting options that are
very handy.
(2) If you still
need to use DARLA, please let me know. We could arrange for a Dartmouth RA here to
process your files on DARLA here on our own campus system,
and we can potentially arrange other special access for
researchers who need the system for multiple jobs. Please write me to
discuss options if needed: James.N.Stanford@Dartmouth.edu
===============================================
Sorry again for the inconvenience!
Jim
------------------------
James N. Stanford
Linguistics Department
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire USA