

Fast and free Speech Recognition with Google's Voice API - taybenlor
http://fennb.com/fast-free-speech-recognition-using-googles-in

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kkowalczyk
Let's be clear here: this is an unauthorized use of Google servers.

Unless Google provides an explicit Terms Of Service for this API endpoints
allowing its use, you can assume that it exists only to serve Google-owned
software (like Chrome).

Just because it exists doesn't mean you can use it.

There's an obvious risk that Google can modify the API and less obvious legal
risk of misusing someone else's resources.

Doesn't mean you can't play with it and use it for experiments but you
probably shouldn't cross the line of actually using it in any production
software.

~~~
dstein
If it's publically accessible and not password or rate-limited then it's fair
game for hackers to goof around with. Just don't base your startup on a (any)
Google API.

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yellowbkpk
This reminds me of the bad old days when Google Maps didn't have an API yet
and people manually de-minified the source and hacked their way into the
hidden API. The original mashups that were created as a result of this hacking
resulted in the Google Maps API as it stands now. I've heard from Googlers
that before the proliferation of these mashups there were no plans at Google
to introduce a public Maps API.

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taf2
The API is not reliable... I've invested a bit of time into this:
<https://github.com/taf2/speech2text> and been underwhelmed so far... might be
interesting to use google as a training tool for sphinx... the issue i found
is because the utterance length supported is so short by google, you need to
then figure out how to break wave's into small word chunks... but then you
lose context so you lose quality...

~~~
pronoiac
There's a random, spammy-looking URL in the description, about call tracking
metrics. Were you aware of that?

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WildUtah
Is there any authorized service for small-scale speech recognition from Google
or anyone else? A free or cheap one?

Or is there any kind of open-source project? I guess there probably is not
since the training set for modern systems would be terabytes of audio data and
probably more proprietary than the algorithms.

~~~
balakk
If you use Windows, there's built-in Speech recognition.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms723627(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms723627\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

There's a server version of it with Microsoft Lync I think.

Microsoft also has a cloud service for the same:

[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/Tellme/technology/default.asp...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/Tellme/technology/default.aspx#tab=cloud)

~~~
yread
when you develop on WP7 you get it for free [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/projects/hawa...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/projects/hawaii/) along with OCR and other goodies. Well, for
research purposes at least

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kleiba
Any ideas why only the first result comes with a confidence value?

~~~
hazexp
I suspect it's because it's the most relevant.

For me personally I wouldn't be interested in using anything besides the most
accurate prediction. However, I would probably make the alternative hypotheses
available to choose in case the best prediction is incorrect. In that case I
can only assume that the hypotheses are listed in decreasing order of
confidences.

~~~
tincholio
If you have a relevant text corpus (e.g. previous transcripts of the same
person), you could use some Markov-type modeling/analysis to verify the
transcription or find the most suitable alternative in the list.

