Enable automatic punctuation

This page describes how to get automatic punctuation in transcription results from Speech-to-Text. When you enable this feature, Speech-to-Text automatically infers the presence of periods, commas, and question marks in your audio data and adds them to the transcript.

By default, Speech-to-Text does not include punctuation marks in the results from speech recognition. However, you can request that Speech-to-Text automatically detect and insert punctuation in transcription results. When you enable automatic punctuation Speech-to-Text will also automatically capitalize the first letter after each period and question mark.

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. Set up a Google Cloud console project.

    Set up a project

    Click to:

    • Create or select a project.
    • Enable the Speech-to-Text API for that project.

    You can view and manage these resources at any time in the Google Cloud console.

  3. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

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

    gcloud init

  5. Set up a Google Cloud console project.

    Set up a project

    Click to:

    • Create or select a project.
    • Enable the Speech-to-Text API for that project.

    You can view and manage these resources at any time in the Google Cloud console.

  6. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

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

    gcloud init

    8. Client libraries can use Application Default Credentials to easily authenticate with Google APIs and send requests to those APIs. With Application Default Credentials, you can test your application locally and deploy it without changing the underlying code. For more information, see Authenticate for using client libraries.

  8. If you're using a local shell, then create local authentication credentials for your user account: 

    gcloud auth application-default login

    You don't need to do this if you're using Cloud Shell.

    If an authentication error is returned, and you are using an external identity provider (IdP), confirm that you have signed in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.

Also ensure you have installed the client library.

Make a transcription request with automatic punctuation

The following code samples demonstrate how to get automatic punctuation details in a transcription request.

Python

import os

from google.cloud.speech_v2 import SpeechClient
from google.cloud.speech_v2.types import cloud_speech

PROJECT_ID = os.getenv("GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT")


def transcribe_auto_punctuation_v2(audio_file: str) -> cloud_speech.RecognizeResponse:
    """Transcribe an audio file with automatically detect and insert punctuation in transcription results.
    Args:
        audio_file (str): Path to the local audio file to be transcribed.
    """
    # Instantiates a client
    client = SpeechClient()

    # Reads a file as bytes
    with open(audio_file, "rb") as f:
        audio_content = f.read()

    config = cloud_speech.RecognitionConfig(
        auto_decoding_config=cloud_speech.AutoDetectDecodingConfig(),
        language_codes=["en-US"],
        model="long",
        features=cloud_speech.RecognitionFeatures(
            # Enable automatic punctuation
            enable_automatic_punctuation=True,
        ),
    )

    request = cloud_speech.RecognizeRequest(
        recognizer=f"projects/{PROJECT_ID}/locations/global/recognizers/_",
        config=config,
        content=audio_content,
    )

    # Transcribes the audio into text
    response = client.recognize(request=request)

    for result in response.results:
        print(f"Transcript: {result.alternatives[0].transcript}")

    return response

See the RecognitionFeatures reference documentation for more information on configuring different features.

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

  • 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

    Delete a Google Cloud project:

    gcloud projects delete PROJECT_ID

    What's next