Transcribe speech to text by using the gcloud CLI
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
Before you can send a request to the Speech-to-Text API, you must have completed the following actions. See the before you begin page for details.
- Enable Speech-to-Text on a GCP project.
- Make sure billing is enabled for Speech-to-Text.
- Create and/or assign one or more service accounts to Speech-to-Text.
- Download a service account credential key.
- Set your authentication environment variable.
- (Optional) Create a new Google Cloud Storage bucket to store your audio data.
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.
Clean up
To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used on this page, follow these 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.