Speech to Text

Remarks#

IBM Watson Speech to Text offers a variety of options for transcribing audio in various languages and formats:

WebSockets – establish a persistent connection over the WebSocket protocol for continuous transcription
Sessionless – transcribe audio without the overhead of establishing and maintaining a session
Sessions – create long multi-turn exchanges with the service or establish multiple parallel conversations with a particular instance of the service
Asynchronous – provides a non-blocking HTTP interface for transcribing audio. You can register a callback URL to be notified of job status and results, or you can poll the service to learn job status and retrieve results manually.

See the Getting Started topic to learn how to get started with Speech to Text and other Watson services. For more Speech to Text details and examples, see the API reference and the documentation.

Recognizing an audio file using WebSockets in Java

Using the Java-SDK 3.0.1

CountDownLatch lock = new CountDownLatch(1);

SpeechToText service = new SpeechToText();
service.setUsernameAndPassword("<username>", "<password>");

FileInputStream audio = new FileInputStream("filename.wav");

RecognizeOptions options = new RecognizeOptions.Builder()
    .continuous(true)
    .interimResults(true)
    .contentType(HttpMediaType.AUDIO_WAV)
    .build();

service.recognizeUsingWebSocket(audio, options, new BaseRecognizeCallback() {
  @Override
  public void onTranscription(SpeechResults speechResults) {
    System.out.println(speechResults);
    if (speechResults.isFinal())
      lock.countDown();
  }
});

lock.await(1, TimeUnit.MINUTES);

Transcribing an audio file using WebSockets (Node.js)

This example shows how to use the IBM Watson Speech to Text service to recognize the type of an audio file and produce a transcription of the spoken text in that file.

This example requires Speech to Text service credentials and Node.js

Install the npm module for the Watson Developer Cloud Node.js SDK:

$ npm install watson-developer-cloud

Create a JavaScript file (for example, app.js) and copy the following code into it. Make sure you enter the username and password for your Speech to Text service instance.

var SpeechToTextV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text/v1');
var fs = require('fs');

var speech_to_text = new SpeechToTextV1({
  username: 'INSERT YOUR USERNAME FOR THE SERVICE HERE',
  password: 'INSERT YOUR PASSWORD FOR THE SERVICE HERE',
  url: 'https://stream.watsonplatform.net/speech-to-text/api'
});

var params = {
  content_type: 'audio/flac'
};

// Create the stream,
var recognizeStream = speech_to_text.createRecognizeStream(params);

// pipe in some audio,
fs.createReadStream('0001.flac').pipe(recognizeStream);

// and pipe out the transcription.
recognizeStream.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('transcription.txt'));

// To get strings instead of Buffers from received `data` events:
recognizeStream.setEncoding('utf8');

// Listen for 'data' events for just the final text.
// Listen for 'results' events to get the raw JSON with interim results, timings, etc.   
['data', 'results', 'error', 'connection-close'].forEach(function(eventName) {
  recognizeStream.on(eventName, console.log.bind(console, eventName + ' event: '));
});

Save the sample audio file 0001.flac to the same directory. This example code is set up to process FLAC files, but you could modify the params section of the sample code to obtain transcriptions from audio files in other formats. Supported formats include WAV (type audio/wav), OGG (type audio/ogg) and others. See the Speech to Text API reference for a complete list.
Run the application (use the name of the file that contains the example code)

$ node app.js

After running the application, you will find the transcribed text from your audio file in the file transcription.txt in the directory from which you ran the application.