Transcribe speech to text by using the command line

This page shows you how to send a speech recognition request to Speech-to-Text using the REST interface and the curl command.

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. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

4. Enable the Speech-to-Text APIs.

   Enable the APIs

5. Make sure that you have the following role or roles on the project: Cloud Speech Administrator

   Check for the roles

   1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

      Go to IAM
   2. Select the project.

   3. In the Principal column, find all rows that identify you or a group that you're included in. To learn which groups you're included in, contact your administrator.

   4. For all rows that specify or include you, check the Role colunn to see whether the list of roles includes the required roles.

   Grant the roles

   1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

      Go to IAM
   2. Select the project.
   3. Click Grant access.

   4. In the New principals field, enter your user identifier. This is typically the email address for a Google Account.

   5. In the Select a role list, select a role.
   6. To grant additional roles, click Add another role and add each additional role.
   7. Click Save.
6. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

7. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

   gcloud init

   Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI previously, make sure you have the latest version by running gcloud components update.

8. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

9. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

10. Enable the Speech-to-Text APIs.

    Enable the APIs

11. Make sure that you have the following role or roles on the project: Cloud Speech Administrator

    Check for the roles

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

       Go to IAM
    2. Select the project.

    3. In the Principal column, find all rows that identify you or a group that you're included in. To learn which groups you're included in, contact your administrator.

    4. For all rows that specify or include you, check the Role colunn to see whether the list of roles includes the required roles.

    Grant the roles

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

       Go to IAM
    2. Select the project.
    3. Click Grant access.

    4. In the New principals field, enter your user identifier. This is typically the email address for a Google Account.

    5. In the Select a role list, select a role.
    6. To grant additional roles, click Add another role and add each additional role.
    7. Click Save.
12. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

13. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

    gcloud init

    Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI previously, make sure you have the latest version by running gcloud components update.

Make an audio transcription request

Use the following code sample to send a recognize REST request to the Speech-to-Text API.

1. Run this command to create a JSON file as input for the request. Replace /full/path/to/audio/file.wav with the path to the audio file you want to transcribe:

   echo "{
     \"config\": {
       \"auto_decoding_config\": {},
       \"language_codes\": [\"en-US\"],
       \"model\": \"long\"
     },
     \"content\": \"$(base64 -w 0 /full/path/to/audio/file.wav | sed 's/+/-/g; s/\//_/g')\"
   }" > /tmp/data.txt
   

2. Use curl to make a recognize request:

   curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
       -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
       -d @/tmp/data.txt \
       https://speech.googleapis.com/v2/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/recognizers/_:recognize
   

   Note: To pass a filename to curl, you use the -d option (for "data") and precede the filename with an @ sign.

   You should see a response similar to the following:

     {
       "results": [
         {
           "alternatives": [
             {
               "transcript": "how old is the Brooklyn Bridge",
               "confidence": 0.98267895
             }
           ]
         }
       ]
     }
   

You sent your first request to Speech-to-Text.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used on this page, follow these steps.

1. Optional: Revoke the authentication credentials that you created, and delete the local credential file.

   gcloud auth application-default revoke

2. Optional: Revoke credentials from the gcloud CLI.

   gcloud auth revoke

Console

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:

• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.

If you plan to explore multiple architectures, tutorials, or quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.

Go to Manage resources

In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.

In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.

gcloud

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:

• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.

If you plan to explore multiple architectures, tutorials, or quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits.

Delete a Google Cloud project:

gcloud projects delete PROJECT_ID

What's next

• Use client libraries to transcribe audio using your favorite programming language.
• Practice transcribing short audio files.
• Learn how to transcribe streaming audio.
• Learn how to transcribe long audio files.
• For best performance, accuracy, and other tips, see the best practices documentation.