speech to text processing - python

Question

I have a project in which the user will send an audio file from android/web to the server. I need to perform speech to text processing on the server and return some files to the user back on android/web. However the server side is to be done using Python. Please guide me as to how it could be done?

Answer 1

Alongside your web application, you can have a queue of tasks that need to be run and worker process(es) to run and track those tasks. This is a popular pattern when web requests need to either start tasks in the background, check in on tasks, or get the result of a task. An introduction to this pattern can be found in the Task Queues section of the Full Stack Python open book. Celery and RQ are two popular projects that supply task queue management and can plug into an existing Python web application, such as one built with Django or Flask.

Once you have task management, you'll have to decide how to keep the user up to date on the status of a task. If you're stuck with having to use RPC-style web service calls only, then you can have clients (e.g. Android or browser) poll for the status by making a call to a web service you've created that checks on the task via your task queue manager's API.

If you want the user to be informed faster or want to reduce wasteful overhead from constant polling, consider supplying a websocket instead. Through a websocket connection, clients could subscribe to notifications of events such as the completion of a speech-to-text job. The Autobahn|Python library provides server code for implementing websockets as well as support for a protocol on top called WAMP that can be used to communicate subscriptions and messages or call upon services. If you need to stick with Django, consider something like django-websocket-redis instead.