Amazon Transcribe FAQs

Q: What is Amazon Transcribe?

Amazon Transcribe is an Amazon Web Services service that makes it easy for customers to convert speech-to-text. Using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, customers can choose to use Amazon Transcribe for a variety of business applications, including transcription of voice-based customer service calls, generation of subtitles on audio/video content, and conduct (text based) content analysis on audio/video content.  

Q: How does Amazon Transcribe interact with other Amazon Web Services products?

Amazon Transcribe converts audio input into text, which opens the door for various text analytics applications on voice input. For instance, by using Amazon Comprehend on the converted text data from Amazon Transcribe, customers can perform sentiment analysis or extract entities and key phrases. Similarly, by integrating with Amazon Translate and Amazon Polly, customers can accept voice input in one language, translate it into another and generate voice output, effectively enabling multi-lingual conversations. It is also possible to integrate Amazon Transcribe with Amazon Elasticsearch to index and perform text based search across audio/video library. 

Q: How will developers access Transcribe?

The easiest way to get started with Amazon Transcribe is to submit a job using the console to transcribe an audio file. You can also call the service directly from the Amazon Command Line Interface, or use one of the supported SDKs of your choice to integrate with your applications. Either way, you can start using Amazon Transcribe to generate automated transcripts for your audio files with just a few lines of code.

Q: What encoding does real-time transcription support?

Streaming transcription currently supports 16-bit Linear PCM encoding.

Q: What languages does Amazon Transcribe support?

For information on language support, please refer to this documentation page.

Q: What devices does Amazon Transcribe work with?

Amazon Transcribe for the most part is device agnostic. In general, Amazon Transcribe works with any device that includes an on-device microphone such as phones, PCs, tablets, and IoT devices (e.g. car audio systems). Amazon Transcribe API will be able to detect the quality of the audio stream being input at the device (8kHz VS 16kHz) and will appropriately select the acoustic models for converting speech-to-text. Furthermore, developers can call Transcribe API through their applications to access speech-to-text conversion capability.

Q: What does it cost?

Refer to the Amazon Transcribe Pricing page to learn more.

Q: Is the content processed by Amazon Transcribe moved outside the Amazon Web Services region where I am using Amazon Transcribe?

Any content processed by Amazon Transcribe is encrypted and stored at rest in the Amazon Web Services region where you are using Amazon Transcribe. We know that you care how information about you is used and shared, and we appreciate your trust that we will do so carefully and sensibly. Please see the Privacy Policy for Amazon Web Services (Beijing Region) and the Privacy Policy for Amazon Web Services (Ningxia Region) for more information.