Blog: Announce speech-to-text

Author: gingerhendrix

blog/2024-11-17-announcing-speech-to-text.md

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+---
+slug: announcing-speech-to-text
+title: "Announcing speech-to-text: CLI Audio Transcription Using Gemini"
+authors: [gingerhendrix]
+tags: []
+---
+
+I've just released `@autocode2/speech-to-text`, a Node.js library and CLI tool that makes it easy to transcribe speech using Google's Gemini API.
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+Gemini is extremely cheap (or free) for audio processing, 1 minute of audio is 1,500 tokens, or 90k tokens/hour.  Google's free tier (if you don't mind sharing your audio with Google) offers:
+- **1.5 Flash**: 1 million free tokens per minute
+- **1.5 Pro**: 32k free tokens per minute (though only 50 requests per day)
+
+Either option allows for a lot of transcription for free, and the quality of Flash is quite reasonable (my accent is hard to parse for many speech-to-text systems, but Flash does a good job).
+
+If you'd rather pay for your tokens (and keep your audio private):
+- **1.5 Flash**: $0.075 per million tokens, or 0.01125 cents per minute, or less than 1 cent per hour
+- **1.5 Pro**: $1.25 per million tokens, or 0.1875 cents per minute, or 11.25 cents per hour
+
+## Quick Start
+
+The quickest way to try it out is with npx:
+
+```bash
+npx @autocode2/speech-to-text --api-key YOUR_API_KEY
+```
+
+This will record from your microphone until you press Enter, then transcribe the audio using Gemini's flash model.
+
+## Features
+
+- **Simple CLI Interface**: Record and transcribe with a single command
+- **File Support**: Transcribe existing audio files or save recordings
+- **Flexible Output**: Text or JSON output, perfect for scripting
+- **Library Integration**: Easy to integrate into Node.js projects
+- **Custom Prompts**: Fine-tune transcription behavior
+
+## Use Cases
+
+You can use it for:
+- Quick voice notes
+- Transcribing meetings or lectures
+- Processing audio files in batch
+- Building transcription into your own tools
+- Experimenting with Gemini's audio capabilities
+
+## Technical Details
+
+The tool uses:
+- `sox` for high-quality audio recording
+- Gemini's flash model for fast, cost-effective transcription
+- Node.js streams for efficient processing
+
+## Getting Started
+
+Check out the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/autocode2/speech-to-text/) for:
+- Full installation instructions
+- Detailed API documentation
+- Usage examples
+- Configuration options
+
+## Future Plans
+
+This is just the beginning - next I want to add realtime transcription.
+
+Try it out and let me know what you think! Feedback and contributions welcome.