[Update] Google Speech-to-Text API updates transcription models

[Tsu-HaoLiu]

Looks like google is making an update to the speech to text api.

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Dear Speech-to-Text user,

We’re writing to let you know about the changes coming to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API. We’ll migrate our classical speech models to our conformer-based models, aiming to improve speech recognition accuracy and performance across a range of use-cases.

You are receiving this notification because we have detected that one or more of your projects has Speech-to-Text API enabled.

What do you need to know?

Since this is a significant model architecture change, we expect it to improve alphanumeric character recognition, enhanced biasing effectiveness, and overall transcription robustness.

As part of this migration, we are updating the all of our models that are exposed through Speech-to-Text V1 API in the corresponding languages and locales:

Model Identifier in V1	Model Identifier in V2	BCP-47 codes
latest_long	long	de-DE, en-AU, en-GB, en-IN, en-US, es-ES, es-US, fr-CA, fr-FR, it-IT, ja-JP, nl-NL, pt-BR
latest_short	short
command_and_search	short
phone_call	telephony
video	long
default	long

What do you need to do?

This change is an internal speech model migration and as such no action is needed from your side in order to use these models. Customers who have migrated to Speech-to-Text V2 API are already using the latest version of the models, under the identifiers presented in the table above. Customers who have not migrated to the Speech-to-Text V2 API and are still on V1 will be automatically migrated starting October 17, 2023, using the existing V1 identifiers. This will not break any backwards compatibility.

If you want to be migrated automatically, no action is required on your part, as this will happen in accordance to the timeline above.

If you want to opt-out temporarily and migrate in your own time, you can do so by November 10, 2023. Using our Google Cloud Speech console, navigate to the “Preview features” section in the navigation bar on the left and enable the dedicated toggle to opt-out.

We’re here to help

If you have any questions or require assistance, please contact Google Speech-toText support. If you’d like to learn more about Speech-to-Text and our latest V2 API, please check Speech-to-Text v2 API resources.

Thanks for choosing Google Speech-to-Text.
— The Google Speech-to-Text Team

[dessant]

Thanks for the heads up regarding the internal model changes! We could also support the new API version, but it looks like Speech-to-Text V2 does not a have a free tier. The lack of a free monthly quota makes it useless for Buster while Speech-to-Text V1 is still available, because V1 works very well and users typically only use up some of the free quota.

https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/pricing