Troubleshooting

Learn about troubleshooting steps that you might find helpful if you run into problems using Speech-to-Text.

Cannot authenticate to Speech-to-Text

You might receive an error message indicating that your "Application Default Credentials" are unavailable or you might be wondering how to get an API key to use when calling Speech-to-Text.

Speech-to-Text uses Application Default Credentials for authentication.

You must have a service account for your project, download the key (JSON file) for your service account to your development environment, and then set the location of that JSON file to an environment variable named GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS.

Furthermore, the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable must be available within the context that you call the Speech-to-Text API. For example, if you set the variable from within an terminal session but run your code in the debugger of your IDE, the execution context of your code might not have access to the variable. In that circumtance, your request to Speech-to-Text might fail for lack of proper authentication.

For more information on how to set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, see the Speech-to-Text quickstarts or the documentation on using the Application Default Credentials.

Speech-to-Text returns an empty response

If a transcript is not returned (e.g. you receive an empty {} JSON response) and no errors have occurred, it's likely that the audio is not using the proper encoding.

Play the file and listen to the output. Is the audio clear and the speech intelligible?

To play files, you can use the SoX (Sound eXchange) play command. A few examples based on different audio encodings are shown below.

FLAC files include a header that indicates the sample rate, encoding type and number of channels, and can be played as follows:
```
play audio.flac
```
LINEAR16 files do not include a header. To play them you must specify the sample rate, encoding type and number of channels. The LINEAR16 encoding must be 16-bits, signed-integer, little-endian.
```
play --channels=1 --bits=16 --rate=16000 --encoding=signed-integer \
--endian=little audio.raw
```
MULAW files also do not include a header and often use a lower sample rate.
```
play --channels=1 --rate=8000 --encoding=u-law audio.raw
```
Speech-to-Text service currently supports only one audio channel.
Check that the audio encoding of your data matches the parameters you sent in RecognitionConfig. For example, if your request specified "encoding":"FLAC" and "sampleRateHertz":16000, the audio data parameters listed by the SoX play command should match these parameters, as follows:
```
play audio.flac
```
should list:
```
Encoding: FLAC
Channels: 1 @ 16-bit
Sampleratehertz: 16000Hz
```
If the SoX listing shows a Sampleratehertz other than 16000Hz, change the "sampleRateHertz" in InitialRecognizeRequest to match. If the Encoding is not FLAC or Channels is not 1 @ 16-bit, you cannot use this file directly, and will need to convert it to a compatible encoding (see next step).
If your audio file is not in FLAC encoding, try converting it to FLAC using SoX, and repeat the steps above to play the file and verify the encoding, sampleRateHertz, and channels. Here are some examples that convert various audio file-formats to FLAC encoding.
```
sox audio.wav --channels=1 --bits=16 audio.flac
sox audio.ogg --channels=1 --bits=16 audio.flac
sox audio.au --channels=1 --bits=16 audio.flac
sox audio.aiff --channels=1 --bits=16 audio.flac
```
To convert a raw file to FLAC, you need to know the audio-encoding of the file. For example, to convert stereo 16-bit signed little-endian at 16000Hz to FLAC:
```
sox --channels=2 --bits=16 --rate=16000 --encoding=signed-integer \
--endian=little audio.raw --channels=1 --bits=16 audio.flac
```
Run the Quickstart example or one of the Sample Applications with the supplied sample audio file. Once the example is running successfully, replace the sample audio file with your audio file.

Unexpected results from speech recognition

If the results returned by Speech-to-Text are not what you expected:

Check the response for error messages.
Note the Quotas & Limits.
To improve recognition accuracy, follow the guidelines in Best Practices.