If you have a project that involves converting speech to text, there is no sense in programming a solution yourself. Certainly, not when there are fantastic speech to text API services out there. Let us teach you how you can get the most out of them.
Choose the right API provider
This is important.
When you are converting speech to text, you need to know that the conversion is going to be 100% accurate. You don’t really want to be spending an age going through everything to ensure that it is 100% accurate.
Ideally, you will also want to ensure that the API is also able to put punctuation into the text for you. Again, this is going to reduce the need for you to spend a long time editing your text. We are not just talking about periods here. We are also talking about commas, parenthesis, etc. This is something that the vast majority of speech to text API services cannot do.
You will also want to ensure that it can deal with your file format. This will save you a lot of hassle. This means that you should choose a provider that can deal with videos if that is what you have to hand.
Edit Your Speech Beforehand
The best systems will charge you by the second for converting your speech to text. While the cost of a second isn’t necessarily going to be that high, if you are converting hundreds of hours of content each month, the cost is going to start to add up.
In order to get the most out of those services, you are going to need to make sure that you edit your speech beforehand. It is going to save you having to edit it once the text has been produced. Plus, you are not going to be converting anything that you do not want in the text, so it is going to save you a little bit of cash too!
Make Sure Your Speech is Crystal Clear
While the best APIs will be able to understand the speech even if it is not perfectly clear, you are just going to be making life harder for yourself like that. A good API will be able to produce something that is reasonably accurate, but you will still have to go through and make sure that everything came out properly.
In order to get the most out of these services, then you will want to ensure that whatever you produce can actually be understood. This means investing in a decent microphone for when you record any speech you want converted to text. It is going to save you a lot of time and effort in the long term.
Stick with the same service
Once you have found a service that you like, stick with it. Use that for your speech to text from there on out. Once you have a degree in confidence in whatever you are using, then why look for something else? You know that whatever you have selected is going to be accurate the vast majority of time, and this will gradually reduce the need for you to do heavy editing.
It is even more important if you stick with a service that is able to produce in a format that you need e.g. in subtitle format, etc.
Conclusion
Understandably, looking for speech to text API services can be daunting at the start. However, we promise you that once you have found a decent company, you will easily be able to find ways to get the most out of it.
