How to feed an audio file from S3 bucket directly to Google speech-to-text

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We are developing a speech application using Google's speech-to-text API. Now our data (audio files) get stored in S3 bucket on AWS. is there a way to directly pass the S3 URI to Google's speech-to-text API?

From their documentation it seems this is at the moment not possible in Google's speech-to-text API enter image description here

This is not the case for their vision and NLP APIs.

  1. Any ideas why this limitation for speech APIs?
  2. And whats a good work around for this?
1 Answers

Currently, Google only allows audio files from either your local source or from Google's Cloud Storage. No reasonable explanation is given on the documentation about this.

Passing audio referenced by a URI More typically, you will pass a uri parameter within the Speech request's audio field, pointing to an audio file (in binary format, not base64) located on Google Cloud Storage

I suggest you move your files to Google Cloud Storage. If you don't want to, there is a good workaround: Use Google Cloud Speech API with streaming API. You are not required to store anything anywhere. Your speech application provides input from any microphone. And don't worry if you don't know handling inputs from microphone.

Google provides a sample code that does it all:

# [START speech_transcribe_streaming_mic]
from __future__ import division

import re
import sys

from google.cloud import speech

import pyaudio
from six.moves import queue

# Audio recording parameters
RATE = 16000
CHUNK = int(RATE / 10)  # 100ms


class MicrophoneStream(object):
    """Opens a recording stream as a generator yielding the audio chunks."""

    def __init__(self, rate, chunk):
        self._rate = rate
        self._chunk = chunk

        # Create a thread-safe buffer of audio data
        self._buff = queue.Queue()
        self.closed = True

    def __enter__(self):
        self._audio_interface = pyaudio.PyAudio()
        self._audio_stream = self._audio_interface.open(
            format=pyaudio.paInt16,
            channels=1,
            rate=self._rate,
            input=True,
            frames_per_buffer=self._chunk,
            # Run the audio stream asynchronously to fill the buffer object.
            # This is necessary so that the input device's buffer doesn't
            # overflow while the calling thread makes network requests, etc.
            stream_callback=self._fill_buffer,
        )

        self.closed = False

        return self

    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
        self._audio_stream.stop_stream()
        self._audio_stream.close()
        self.closed = True
        # Signal the generator to terminate so that the client's
        # streaming_recognize method will not block the process termination.
        self._buff.put(None)
        self._audio_interface.terminate()

    def _fill_buffer(self, in_data, frame_count, time_info, status_flags):
        """Continuously collect data from the audio stream, into the buffer."""
        self._buff.put(in_data)
        return None, pyaudio.paContinue

    def generator(self):
        while not self.closed:
            # Use a blocking get() to ensure there's at least one chunk of
            # data, and stop iteration if the chunk is None, indicating the
            # end of the audio stream.
            chunk = self._buff.get()
            if chunk is None:
                return
            data = [chunk]

            # Now consume whatever other data's still buffered.
            while True:
                try:
                    chunk = self._buff.get(block=False)
                    if chunk is None:
                        return
                    data.append(chunk)
                except queue.Empty:
                    break

            yield b"".join(data)


def listen_print_loop(responses):
    """Iterates through server responses and prints them.
    The responses passed is a generator that will block until a response
    is provided by the server.
    Each response may contain multiple results, and each result may contain
    multiple alternatives; for details, see the documentation.  Here we
    print only the transcription for the top alternative of the top result.
    In this case, responses are provided for interim results as well. If the
    response is an interim one, print a line feed at the end of it, to allow
    the next result to overwrite it, until the response is a final one. For the
    final one, print a newline to preserve the finalized transcription.
    """
    num_chars_printed = 0
    for response in responses:
        if not response.results:
            continue

        # The `results` list is consecutive. For streaming, we only care about
        # the first result being considered, since once it's `is_final`, it
        # moves on to considering the next utterance.
        result = response.results[0]
        if not result.alternatives:
            continue

        # Display the transcription of the top alternative.
        transcript = result.alternatives[0].transcript

        # Display interim results, but with a carriage return at the end of the
        # line, so subsequent lines will overwrite them.
        #
        # If the previous result was longer than this one, we need to print
        # some extra spaces to overwrite the previous result
        overwrite_chars = " " * (num_chars_printed - len(transcript))

        if not result.is_final:
            sys.stdout.write(transcript + overwrite_chars + "\r")
            sys.stdout.flush()

            num_chars_printed = len(transcript)

        else:
            print(transcript + overwrite_chars)

            # Exit recognition if any of the transcribed phrases could be
            # one of our keywords.
            if re.search(r"\b(exit|quit)\b", transcript, re.I):
                print("Exiting..")
                break

            num_chars_printed = 0


def main():
    language_code = "en-US"  # a BCP-47 language tag

    client = speech.SpeechClient()
    config = speech.RecognitionConfig(
        encoding=speech.RecognitionConfig.AudioEncoding.LINEAR16,
        sample_rate_hertz=RATE,
        language_code=language_code,
    )

    streaming_config = speech.StreamingRecognitionConfig(
        config=config, interim_results=True
    )

    with MicrophoneStream(RATE, CHUNK) as stream:
        audio_generator = stream.generator()
        requests = (
            speech.StreamingRecognizeRequest(audio_content=content)
            for content in audio_generator
        )

        responses = client.streaming_recognize(streaming_config, requests)

        # Now, put the transcription responses to use.
        listen_print_loop(responses)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
# [END speech_transcribe_streaming_mic]

Dependencies are google-cloud-speech and pyaudio

For AWS S3, you can store your audio files there before/after you get the transcripts from Google Speech API. Streaming is super fast as well.

And don't forget to include your credentials. You need to get authorized first by providing GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS

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