Transcribe audio from streaming input

This section demonstrates how to transcribe streaming audio, like the input from a microphone, to text.

Streaming speech recognition lets you stream audio to Cloud Speech-to-Text and receive a stream speech recognition results in real time as the audio is processed. See also the audio limits for streaming speech recognition requests. Streaming speech recognition is available through gRPC only.

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.

Perform streaming speech recognition on a local file

The following code block contains an example of performing streaming speech recognition on a local audio file. There is a 25 KB limit on audio sent in the requests of a stream. This limit applies to to both the initial StreamingRecognize request and the size of each individual message in the stream. Exceeding this limit will throw an error.

Python

import os

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

PROJECT_ID = os.getenv("GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT")

def transcribe_streaming_v2(
    stream_file: str,
) -> cloud_speech_types.StreamingRecognizeResponse:
    """Transcribes audio from an audio file stream using Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API.
    Args:
        stream_file (str): Path to the local audio file to be transcribed.
            Example: "resources/audio.wav"
    Returns:
        list[cloud_speech_types.StreamingRecognizeResponse]: A list of objects.
            Each response includes the transcription results for the corresponding audio segment.
    """
    # Instantiates a client
    client = SpeechClient()

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

    # In practice, stream should be a generator yielding chunks of audio data
    chunk_length = len(audio_content) // 5
    stream = [
        audio_content[start : start + chunk_length]
        for start in range(0, len(audio_content), chunk_length)
    ]
    audio_requests = (
        cloud_speech_types.StreamingRecognizeRequest(audio=audio) for audio in stream
    )

    recognition_config = cloud_speech_types.RecognitionConfig(
        auto_decoding_config=cloud_speech_types.AutoDetectDecodingConfig(),
        language_codes=["en-US"],
        model="chirp_3",
    )
    streaming_config = cloud_speech_types.StreamingRecognitionConfig(
        config=recognition_config
    )
    config_request = cloud_speech_types.StreamingRecognizeRequest(
        recognizer=f"projects/{PROJECT_ID}/locations/global/recognizers/_",
        streaming_config=streaming_config,
    )

    def requests(config: cloud_speech_types.RecognitionConfig, audio: list) -> list:
        yield config
        yield from audio

    # Transcribes the audio into text
    responses_iterator = client.streaming_recognize(
        requests=requests(config_request, audio_requests)
    )
    responses = []
    for response in responses_iterator:
        responses.append(response)
        for result in response.results:
            print(f"Transcript: {result.alternatives[0].transcript}")

    return responses

While you can stream a local audio file to the Speech-to-Text API, it is recommended that you perform synchronous audio recognition.

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