Is there a speech to text API or some "hack" by which I can use Google's speech to text facilities?

Question

I think Google's speech to text facilities (Google Voice automatic transcription of voicemail, automatic captioning of videos on YouTube etc) are quite impressive.

I did look to see whether Google has made it available through an API and it seems they haven't (not that I blame them!). A cloud computing service providing speech to text functionality would be pretty cool though.

Is there some sort of "hack" that I can use to access the speech to text. My architecture basically comes down to this - a short 15-20 second wav/mp3/other clip as the input, output is plaintext.

Any ideas people?

Answer 1

There are a lot of speech to text APIs. Just because Google doesn't make theirs available, it doesn't mean you're out of luck.

Here is a good one for C#. You can search for others for your platform if it's not .NET.

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

Check this out: http://mikepultz.com/2011/03/accessing-google-speech-api-chrome-11/

I am currently trying to implement the API in PHP.

--Seth