Quickstart: Using the gcloud tool

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

  1. 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.
  2. Set up a Cloud Console project.

    Set up a 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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