Bringing Live Transcribe's Speech Engine to Everyone

Earlier this year, Google launched Live Transcribe, an Android application that provides real-time automated captions for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through many months of user testing, we've learned that robustly delivering good captions for long-form conversations isn't so easy, and we want to make it easier for developers to build upon what we've learned. Live Transcribe's speech recognition is provided by Google's state-of-the-art Cloud Speech API, which under most conditions delivers pretty impressive transcript accuracy. However, relying on the cloud introduces several complications--most notably robustness to ever-changing network connections, data costs, and latency. Today, we are sharing our transcription engine with the world so that developers everywhere can build applications with robust transcription. Those who have worked with our Cloud Speech API know that sending infinitely long streams of audio is currently unsupported.