This page shows you how to send a speech recognition request to
Speech-to-Text using the
gcloud
tool from the command
line.
Speech-to-Text enables easy integration of Google speech recognition technologies into developer applications. You can send audio data to the Speech-to-Text API, which then returns a text transcription of that audio file. For more information about the service, see Speech-to-Text basics.
Before you begin
- Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
-
Set up a Cloud Console project.
Click to:
- Create or select a project.
- Enable the Speech-to-Text API for that project.
- Create a service account.
- Download a private key as JSON.
You can view and manage these resources at any time in the Cloud Console.
-
Set the environment variable
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
to the path of the JSON file that contains your service account key. This variable only applies to your current shell session, so if you open a new session, set the variable again. - Install and initialize the Cloud SDK.
Make an audio transcription request
Now you can use Speech-to-Text to transcribe an audio file
to text. Use the following code sample to send a
recognize
request to the Speech-to-Text API.
Open the command line shell and run the following command.
gcloud ml speech recognize gs://cloud-samples-tests/speech/brooklyn.flac \ --language-code=en-US
This command requests that Speech-to-Text transcribe the audio contained in a FLAC hosted at a publicly accessible location.
If the request is successful, the server returns a response in JSON format:
{ "results": [ { "alternatives": [ { "confidence": 0.9840146, "transcript": "how old is the Brooklyn Bridge" } ] } ] }
Congratulations! You've sent your first request to Speech-to-Text.
If you receive an error or an empty response from Speech-to-Text, take a look at the troubleshooting and error mitigation steps.
What's next
- Practice transcribing short audio files.
- Learn how to batch long audio files for speech recognition.
- Learn how to transcribe streaming audio like from a microphone.
- Get started with the Speech-to-Text in your language of choice by using a Speech-to-Text client library.
- Work through the sample applications.
- For best performance, accuracy, and other tips, see the best practices documentation.