watson-speech

IBM Watson Speech Services for Web Browsers

Allows you to easily add voice recognition and synthesis to any web app with minimal code.

Built for Browsers

This library is primarily intended for use in web browsers. Check out ibm-watson to use Watson services (speech and others) from Node.js.

However, a server-side component is required to generate auth tokens. The examples/ folder includes example Node.js and Python servers, and SDKs are available for Node.js, Java, Python, and there is also a REST API.

Installation - standalone

Pre-compiled bundles are available from on GitHub Releases - just download the file and drop it into your website: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-javascript-sdk/releases

Installation - bower

bower install --save watson-speech

Installation - npm with Browserify or Webpack

This library can be bundled with browserify or Webpack and easy included in larger projects:

npm install --save watson-speech

This method enables a smaller bundle by only including the desired components, for example:

var recognizeMic = require('watson-speech/speech-to-text/recognize-microphone');

Using with IAM

This SDK CAN be used in the browser with services that use IAM for authentication. This does require a server-side component - an endpoint used to retrieve the token. An example can be found here.

In a local environment you should set only the TEXT_TO_SPEECH_IAM_APIKEY and SPEECH_TO_TEXT_IAM_APIKEY in your .env file, see example file here.

Once that is set up, the token can be used in your SDK request with the parameter access_token. See this example.

Using with Angular

Make sure polyfills.ts has following entries:

(window as any).global = window;
(window as any).process = require('process/browser');
import 'zone.js/dist/zone';  // Included with Angular CLI.
global.Buffer = global.Buffer || require('buffer').Buffer;

Changes

See CHANGELOG.md for a complete list of changes.

Development

Global Transaction ID

Unfortunately, there is no way to set or get the global transaction id provided by the initial websocket handshake with the Speech service. This is due to limitations from the W3C Websocket API for browser. It is possible; however, to grab the X-Global-Transaction-Id header through a browser's dev tool "Network" tab. After making a call to the service, look for a request to the v1/recognize endpoint which should return a 101 code. The response headers from that request will contain the X-Global-Transaction-Id header.

Use examples for development

The provided examples can be used to test developmental code in action:

• cd examples/
• npm run dev

This will build the local code, move the new bundle into the examples/ directory, and start a new server at localhost:3000 where the examples will be running.

Note: This requires valid service credentials.

Testing

The test suite is broken up into offline unit tests and integration tests that test against actual service instances.

• npm test will run the linter and the offline tests
• npm run test-offline will run the offline tests
• npm run test-integration will run the integration tests

To run the integration tests, service credentials are required. Make sure you have a valid .env file in the root directory.