Amazon Transcribe
Learn about Amazon Transcribe’s capability to convert speech to text for both streaming and batch transcription.
Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service that converts speech into text. It is a fully managed service that is being constantly trained by Amazon to yield better results. The service does not require any prior machine-learning experience and can be integrated with applications without extensive setup.
Traditionally, transcribing audio was a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process. The transcription services available were hard to integrate into applications and did not produce accurate results. Alternatively, companies needed to hire someone to manually transcribe the audio files. This approach incurred significant costs and introduced potential errors and delays.
Amazon Transcribe revolutionizes the transcription process by offering cost-effective and highly accurate results. It can seamlessly convert live or pre-recorded audio into time-stamped transcripts.
How Amazon Transcribe works
Amazon Transcribe uses deep-learning technologies to transcribe live or pre-recorded audio files. Along with the transcribed text, it provides additional metadata about the content, such as confidence scores and timestamps for words and even punctuation marks.
Amazon Transcribe divides its transcription methods into two categories – Batch transcription and Streaming transcription. The division is done according to the content provided to both categories. The features and supported languages also differ for streaming and batch transcription.
Streaming transcription
The real-time transcription of audio lies in the Streaming transcription category. It enables the transcription of live audio streams as they occur. Streaming media, including live news broadcasts, speeches, pre-recorded podcasts, movies, and others, are delivered to Amazon Transcribe in real time, and the transcribed results are received simultaneously.
Amazon Transcribe also offers the capability to identify and redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in real-time streams, ensuring compliance and privacy protection.
The real-time audio content is delivered to Amazon Transcribe in the form of sequential chunks or packets. SDKs, HTTP/2, WebSockets, and AWS Management Console can be used for the delivery. The audio can only be in FLAC, OPUS-encoded audio in an Ogg container, and 16-bit little-endian PCM (WAV is not included) audio format.
Batch transcription
The transcription of media files uploaded to Amazon S3 lies under the category of Batch transcription. The Batch transcription uses Transcription jobs. The easiest way to transcribe an audio file is to create a transcription job directly from the AWS console and provide the audio file location on S3.
For multiple audio files, we can also create simultaneous job requests. However, there is a limit to this. If we want to make concurrent requests that exceed the quota, we can use Job queueing. It creates a queue for all the transcription job requests that do not fall under the quota of concurrent requests. Each request is then processed following the FIFO order.
The Batch transcription can be done through SDKs. In this case, a transcription job will be automatically created on running the batch transcription on the audio file.
Customize language models
Amazon Transcribe allows customizing the language models according to the requirements and improving the transcription accuracy. It is beneficial for transcribing speeches outside the realm of general, everyday conversations. For instance, specialized content with technical jargon and industry-specific terms can be easily converted into text by customizing the language model accordingly.
Other Amazon Transcribe services
Amazon Transcribe can be used in multiple scenarios. For common use cases, Amazon Transcribe has the following pre-defined services and APIs:
Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics: An API powered by generative artificial intelligence to produce precise call transcripts. It is also capable of detecting and extracting important insights from speeches. It is trained on large language models (LLM) and other powerful speech-to-text models to help businesses like call centers and customer support.
Amazon Transcribe Medical: It is an automatic speech recognition service (ASR) tailored to healthcare professionals and organizations' unique needs. It offers accurate and cost-effective transcription of patient-physician conversations, medical dictations, or other medical-related audios.
AWS HealthScribe: It is a machine-learning capability similar to Amazon Transcribe Medical. It combines ASR technology with generative AI to produce clinical notes. The service can read the conversations between physician and patient, categorize the dialogues according to the role, extract medical terminologies, and generate accurate clinical notes.
There are many other use cases where Amazon Transcribe serves as an ideal solution such as for subtitles generation, content filtration, and others.
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