Picking a Package

00:00 Picking a Python speech recognition package. A handful of packages for speech recognition exist on PyPI. A few of them are shown on the list onscreen now.

00:14 Some of these packages such as API.AI and Wit offer built-in features like natural language processing for identifying a speaker’s intent, which go beyond basic speech recognition.

00:27 Others, like google-cloud-speech, focus solely on speech-to-text conversion.

00:34 There is one package that stands out in terms of ease-of-use: SpeechRecognition. Recognizing speech requires audio input, and SpeechRecognition makes retrieving this input really easy. Instead of having to build scripts for accessing microphones and processing audio files from scratch, SpeechRecognition will have you up and running in just a few minutes.

00:55 The SpeechRecognition library acts as a wrapper for several popular speech APIs and is thus extremely flexible. One of these, the Google Web Speech API, supports a default API key that is hard-coded into the SpeechRecognition library.

01:10 That means you can get up and running without having to sign up for a service. The flexibility and ease-of-use of the SpeechRecognition package make it an excellent choice for any Python project. However, support for every feature of each API it wraps is not guaranteed.

01:26 You’ll need to spend some time researching the available options to find out if SpeechRecognition will work in your particular case.

01:34 So, now that you’re convinced you should try out SpeechRecognition, the next step is to install it in your environment, and that’s what’s covered in the following section.