Real-Time Transcription business server demo

Real-Time Transcription (RTT) takes the audio content of a host's media stream and transcribes it into written words in real time. This Java project demonstrates how to set up a business server that your app uses to start and stop Real-Time Transcription tasks.

Understand the tech

To start transcribing the audio in a channel in real-time, you send an HTTP request to the Agora SD-RTN™ through your business server. Real-Time Transcription provides the following modes:

• Transcribe speech in real-time, then stream this data to the channel.
• Transcribe speech in real-time, store the text in the WebVTT format, and upload the file to third-party cloud storage.

Real-Time Transcription transcribes at most three speakers in a channel. When there are more than three speakers, the top three are selected based on volume, and their audio is transcribed.

The following figure shows the workflow to start, query, and stop a Real-Time Transcription task:

To use the RESTful API to transcribe speech, your server makes the following calls:

1. acquire: Request a builderToken that authenticates the user and gives permission to start Real-Time Transcription . You must call start using this builderToken within five minutes.
2. start: Begin the transcription task. Once you start a task, builderToken remains valid for the entire session. Use the same builderToken to query and stop the task.
3. query: Check the task status.
4. stop: Stop the transcription task.

Prerequisites

In order to deploy a demo Real-Time Transcription business server on Railway, you must have a Railway account verified through your github account.

If you want to build and run the server locally, you will need to have:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.8 or higher.
• Installed git on your development machine.
• Installed Maven on your system.
• An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) configured to work with Maven Java projects.
• Curl for testing your server implementation.
• Enabled Real-Time Transcription for your project. Contact [email protected]
• Activated a supported cloud storage service to record and store Real-Time Transcription texts.

Implement a business server

You create a business server as a bridge between your app and Agora Real-Time Transcription. Implementing this business server provides the following benefits:

• Improved security as your apiKey, apiSecret, builderToken, and taskId, are not exposed to the client.
• Token processing is securely handled on the business server.
• Avoid splicing complex request body strings on the client side to reduce the probability of errors.
• Implement additional functionality on the business server. For example:
  • Billing for Real-Time Transcription
  • Checking user privileges and the payment status of a user
• If the REST API is updated, you do not need to update the client.

One-click deployment on Railway

To quickly deploy the RTT demo server on Railway:

1. Click the following button:

   

2. On the Railway deployment page, click Deploy Now. You see a serer configuration form.

3. Fill in the APP_ID, APP_CERTIFICATE, CUSTOMER_ID, and CUSTOMER_SECRET from Agora Console.

4. To specify your object storage service (OSS), fill in the values for OSS_ACCESS_KEY, OSS_SECRET_KEY, and OSS_BUCKET_NAME.

5. To complete the deployment, click Deploy. Railway creates a project instance and starts the build process.

6. Switch to the Settings tab and scroll down to Domains. Click on Generate Domain to expose the service to the public internet and copy the displayed url.

7. To test your demo server, follow the steps in Test your implementation but replace https://localhost:80 with your Railway url.

Build and run the demo business server

To set up the demo Real-time Transcription business server, do the following:

1. Download the Git repository

   Clone the agora-rtt-server repository to your development device using the following command:

   git clone https://github.com/AgoraIO/agora-rtt-server.git <your download directory>

2. Specify connection variables

   1. Open agora-rtt-server\src\main\java\rtt\RttTask.java and update the values for appId, appCertificate, customerId, and customerSecret from Agora Console.
   2. Specify the ossAccessKey, ossSecretKey, and the ossBucketName to configure cloud storage.

3. Build the server project

   To download the dependencies and initiate the Maven build process, execute the following command in the terminal :

   mvn clean install

4. Start the server

   In your IDE, click Start debugging to launch the server. You see the following message in the terminal:

   RTT server started on port 80
   

Test your implementation

To test your business server, take the following steps:

1. Start an RTT task.

   Execute the following command in a terminal window:

   curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"UserId\": \"123\", \"channelName\": \"demo\"}" http://localhost:80/rttStart

   The command makes an HTTP request to RTT within the JSON body. The body contains the following parameters:

   • UserId: The parameter identifies the user starting the RTT task, so that the business server may check user's privileges and payment status.
   • channelName: The channel for which the RTT task is to be started.

   You see a message in the terminal confirming that the RTT task was started successfully. You also see a confirmation message displayed in the server console with the channel name and task ID.

2. Query the status of an RTT task.

   Execute the following command in a terminal window:

   curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"channelName\": \"demo\"}" http://localhost:80/rttQuery

   Your server retrieves the task ID and builder token for the task associated with the channelName specified in the request and sends a request to query the task status. You see the retrieved status displayed in the terminal.

3. Stop the RTT task.

   Execute the following command in a terminal window:

   curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"channelName\": \"demo\"}" http://localhost:80/rttStop

   Your server retrieves the task ID and builder token for the task associated with the channelName and sends a request to stop the task. You see a confirmation message displayed in the terminal.

Reference

This section contains additional content that completes the information in this page, or points you to documentation that explains other aspects to this product.

REST API

To test the Real-time Transcription REST API, and to see request parameter details, refer to the Postman Collection.

List of supported languages

Use the following language codes in the recognizeConfig.language parameter of the start request. The current version supports at most two languages, separated by commas.

Language	Code
Chinese (Cantonese, Traditional)	zh-HK
Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)	zh-CN
Chinese (Taiwanese Putonghua)	zh-TW
English (India)	en-IN
English (US)	en-US
French (French)	fr-FR
German (Germany)	de-DE
Hindi (India)	hi-IN
Indonesian (Indonesia)	id-ID
Italian (Italy)	it-IT
Japanese (Japan)	ja-JP
Korean (South Korea)	ko-KR
Portuguese (Portugal)	pt-PT
Spanish (Spain)	es-ES

Supported third-party cloud storage services

The following third-party cloud storage service providers are supported:

• Alibaba Cloud
• Amazon S3
• Baidu AI Cloud
• Google Cloud
• Huawei Cloud
• Kingsoft Cloud
• Microsoft Azure
• Qiniu Cloud
• Tencent Cloud