The reason could be the significant advancement in speech recognition to improve accuracy, accessibility, and affordability. According to a survey, 79% of respondents stated time-saving as one of the benefits of using a speech-to-text solution. In 2020, the global speech recognition market was approximately USD 10 billion. Today, organizations and individuals produce more content, use voice commands to control applications and devices, use chatbots. This is where speech-to-text APIs can help them hugely in addition to dictation and translation, to produce written text. So, if you are looking for the best speech-to-text APIs, this article can help you. But before that, let’s understand some fundamentals of speech-to-text.
What are Speech-to-Text APIs?
Speech-to-text or speech recognition is a technology for transcribing spoken words or audio content into text. It is accomplished using applications, APIs, tools, and other software solutions. So, speech-to-text APIs are simple APIs or application programming interfaces that perform speech recognition to transcribe voice into written text. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect patterns in sound waves for accurate transcription. Some features of speech-to-text APIs are:
Support multiple languages other than English Take various audio inputs, including files stored on computer and cloud, microphones, etc. Paragraph detection Speaker labels Custom Vocabulary Topic detection Automatic casing and punctuation Profanity filtering and more
Why use speech-to-text APIs?
Speech-to-text APIs offer plenty of advantages to individuals and businesses.
Boosts productivity and efficiency
Manually typing long texts for articles, documentation, presentations, etc., takes a lot of effort. Instead, you can use a speech-to-text API to dictate your words and get them written as text. It will ease your work and accelerate your workflow while giving the necessary rest to your hands.
Reliable
Using a good speech-to-text API offers excellent accuracy. Hence, you can rely on these solutions to create documents and papers with faster turnaround times and fewer errors. It also helps you multitask. So, always choose a highly accurate speech-to-text API such as Rev that offers 84% accuracy.
Saves time
Not only does manual means of writing heavy text take effort but plenty of time. As you know, speaking is faster than writing; using speech-to-text APIs will save you time significantly. It also is hugely helpful for professionals whose writing speed is slow or average. Hence, you can submit your work faster and dedicate the saved time to other productive activities.
Helps people with physical disabilities
People with certain physical disabilities, like dyslexia, trauma, etc., may face challenges using conventional devices and input formats like keyboards. Using speech-to-text APIs can help them input words in their voice without having to type them manually. This will ease their difficulties and increase their productivity.
Where are speech-to-text APIs used?
Speech-to-text APIs are a huge help in many scenarios. Some of their use cases are:
Automated dictation
If you are a content creator, writer, or anyone who needs to type long-form text, speech-to-text APIs can help you. Instead of typing each word manually, you can use the API to dictate your words, and it will produce the written text for you.
Voice commanding
You can trigger some actions through your voice using a speech-to-text API. For example: entering queries by voice and choosing a menu item.
Smart assistant
Speech-to-text APIs are used in smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, etc., to control appliances, web applications, cars, etc. It will enable a command-and-control or natural interface for search queries.
Chatbots
Chatbots are heavily used across websites and applications to help visitors and users with their questions. So, if you are building a chatbot application, you can use a speech-to-text API to enable users to make queries using their voice while interacting with bots.
Translation
Speech-to-text APIs come with voice translation and multiple language support features to help users communicate verbally with other users speaking different languages. Many speech-to-text APIs support wide-ranging global languages to enable seamless global communications.
Mixed language detection
Even if you use multiple languages while dictating with the help of a speech-to-text API, you can produce documents easily. Many of them can detect mixed languages by identifying spoken languages automatically and transcribing the words properly without requiring you to speak only one language while transcribing.
Transcriptions for call centers
Call centers might need to record conversations between their agents and end-users during customer support, sales, etc. They may need this for audits or quality assurance purposes. So, if you need help with this, speech-to-text APIs can help by sending audio recordings in a batch for transcription. So, if you are looking for the best speech-to-text API for your business or personal use, here are some of the options.
Amberscript
Get the most accurate and one of the best speech-to-text APIs in the market – Amberscript. It provides custom ASR models according to your needs and lets you integrate them easily with your software for real-time audio and video files, texts perfected by humans, and phone calls. Automate your workflows and transcribe a wide range of video and audio via Amberscript’s speech-to-text API. It transfers the files to the ASR server and returns them in your preferred format. It is available in 80+ languages and supports automatic punctuation, speaker labels, automatic casing, timestamps, dual-channel audio, and another video/audio file formats. You can include information like start-end time per word, question indications, confidence scores, punctuations, etc., in XML/JSON format. Amberscript makes the audio accessible with .doc/.txt, exported with/without speaker changes and timestamps. Amberscript supports formats like EBU-STL and VTT to help with automated subtitles. You can also determine the settings for the appearance of subtitles individually. It combines the latest science, language, and technology knowledge to develop user-specific models for various use cases. Upon customizing it, it improves speech recognition for:
The acoustic environments Different accents Adaptation of vocabulary to recognize special terms, product names, and abbreviations Adaptation to domain-specific languages, such as healthcare, technology, physics, politics, and more
Try Amberscript for free. Avail more benefits at $10 for one hour of video or audio upload.
Rev
Get your speech transcription and recognition in real time with Rev API. It enables speech-to-text live streaming for live captions. It serves many industries:
Media and entertainment: It enhances the accessibility of the broadcast content or live web. Education: It enhances the accessibility of webinars, events, and lectures. Call centers and analytics: It trains sales agents and transcribes calls. It also serves other industries by transcribing training, events, and meetings in real-time.
Rev covers almost all major English languages across the globe and provides the best result out of context, regardless of who is speaking. It produces real-time captions with minimum lag and uses natural languages to produce highly accurate, context-aware, fully punctuated, and readable transcription. You can share industry-specific names, terminology, and more to enhance the accuracy of the transcripts. In addition, it filters around 600 offensive words from the captions and lets you track the start time and end time of each word. Deploy speech-to-text solutions in your applications easily and remove communication barriers with ease.
Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text
Use a powerful API to convert speeches into texts accurately with the help of Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text solution. It offers an excellent user experience by transcribing your speech with accurate captions. It also helps improve your services through the insights taken and transcribed from your customer interactions. You can apply Google’s advanced deep-learning neural network algorithms to detect speech automatically. It also provides a model customization feature where you can experiment, manage, and create custom resources. In addition, you can deploy your speech recognition flexibly in the cloud or on-premises. Google Cloud’s advanced technology helps in recognizing domain-specific terms through hints. It automatically converts spoken numbers into years, currencies, addresses, and other classes. You can even choose from domain-specific models to get specific quality requirements according to the service. Furthermore, Google Cloud’s speech-to-text solution provides an easy-to-use user interface to experiment with speech audio and try various configurations to get accuracy and quality. Additionally, you can run your speech-to-text solution in your private data centers to have complete control over infrastructure and speech data. They offer a 60-minute free tier. Afterward, you will be charged per 15 seconds of audio. Take your next step now and try the features for free.
AssemblyAI
AssemblyAI’s speech-to-text APIs help converts audio and video files and audio streams to text automatically and help them understand properly. The latest AI models power AssemblyAI’s speech-to-text, and its Audio Intelligence can detect topics, moderate content, and summarize the content. Integrate the simple API in your systems within minutes and understand audio properly without any errors. You can build robust apps with features like entity detection, PII redaction, sentiment analysis, and more. In addition, you can transcribe video and audio files automatically with the highest accuracy and extract essential insights from the data, including sentiment, sensitive content, topics, and more. It only offers a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. The price for core transcription is $0.00025/second, and audio intelligence $0.000167/second. Start now for free and leverage cutting-edge technology.
IBM Watson Speech to Text
IBM Watson Speech to Text offers AI-powered transcription and speech recognition solutions. It enables accurate and fast speech recognition in different languages for various use cases, such as customer self-service, speech analytics, agent assistance, and more. Like a human, it listens to the conversation carefully, transcribes the audio, gets the relevant content, and feeds the perfect answer accurately. You can train Watson on your preferred domain language and audio characteristics and deploy the speech-to-text solution on any cloud platform, including private, hybrid, public, multicolored, or on-premises. Integrate the solution with your applications to get accurate results all the time. You can also use the solution for acoustic and language training options. You will get pre-trained speech models, model training, fine-tuning features, low latency, audio diagnostics, interim transcription, smart formatting, word filtering, and spotting. Start converting speech to text for free for 500 minutes/month. Pay $0.01/minute to tune your speech models and improve accuracy.
Scriptix
Scriptix offers a cloud-based speech-to-text service, and its customized models generate the best outputs out of the box for your content. It helps you turn your voice data into text for easy accessibility, analysis, and discovery. Governments, telco, media, and healthcare use transcription to improve digital presence. Whether you want it for small amounts of transcriptions or subtitles, Scriptix has many benefits. You will get confidence scores, timestamps, real-time processing, punctuation, multichannel processing, various file supports, and more. It is available in thirteen languages, including Arabic, English, French, Italian, Swedish, German, Dutch, Danish, Flemish, Norwegian, and more. Integrate speech-to-text API now with your applications and experience the best.
Conclusion
Using speech-to-text APIs is helpful for individuals and businesses. With their impressive capabilities, you can use them for dictation, chatbots, translation, voice commanding, transcription, and many more. Thus, if you are looking for the best speech-to-text APIs, you can consider the above options to save time and effort and boost productivity.
