Amazon Transcribe enhances custom vocabulary with custom pronunciations and display forms

Posted on: Mar 28, 2019

Amazon Transcribe is a fully-managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports custom pronunciations and display forms, augmenting the capability of the custom vocabulary feature.

You can give Amazon Transcribe more information about how to process speech in your input audio or video file by creating a custom vocabulary. A custom vocabulary is a list of specific words that you want Amazon Transcribe to recognize in your audio input. These are generally domain-specific words and phrases, words that Amazon Transcribe isn't recognizing, or proper nouns.

Now, with the use of characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), you can enhance each custom terminology with corresponding custom pronunciations. Alternatively, you can also use the standard orthography of the language to mimic the way that the word or phrase sounds.

Additionally, you can now designate exactly how a customer terminology should be displayed when it is transcribed (e.g. “Street” as “St.” versus “ST”).

The custom pronunciation and display forms enhancements to custom vocabulary are available in all regions where Amazon Transcribe is available. Try out the new custom vocabulary features via the Amazon Transcribe console or use the Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs. For more information, visit this documentation page.