Quick Start Guide: Converting Audio to Text with Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to the quick start for Cloud Speech-to-Text, which converts speech into text using Google's AI technologies. In this video, we walk through how to convert an audio file to text using the REST interface and the curl command. To get started with Cloud Speech-to-Text, you need a Google Cloud project. You can use an existing project or set up a new one in the Google Cloud Console at console.cloud.google.com. Visit the APIs and Services section of the console and enable the Cloud Speech-to-Text API for your project. Next, you need to set up authentication. In the APIs and Services section, click on Credentials, create a new service account, and download the private key as JSON. You can use these credentials to access Google Cloud APIs, so make sure to keep this file secure and out of your code and public repositories. To securely access the credentials from your project, go to your terminal and set an environment variable to the path of your JSON file. If you don't yet have the Google Cloud SDK installed on your machine, then install and initialize it. Instructions are linked below. Create a new JSON request file, add the following text, and save it as a sync-request.json plain text file. This JSON snippet indicates that the audio file has a FLAC encoding format, a sample rate of 16,000 Hz, and is stored in a Google Cloud Storage bucket at the given URI. Next, use curl to make a request to the speech.googleapis.com endpoint. This curl command specifies sync-request.json as the file name of the JSON request you just created. Run the curl command, and you should see the following response. Here we can see the transcribed text, as well as a confidence value that estimates how likely it is that the transcription is accurate. And that's it. You now know how to make a call to the Cloud Speech-to-Text API using a curl command. Make sure to check out the rest of our Cloud Speech-to-Text documentation at cloud.google.com slash speech-to-text slash docs.