google-asr-africa

Transcribe African-language speech with Google's free web ASR endpoint — only for the languages where it actually works.

Google's free endpoint silently falls back to English for unsupported languages, so you can get English "transcripts" of your African audio. This package only ships languages we've verified transcribe in their own orthography — with a resumable batch transcriber and a probe to test new ones.

Install

pip install google-asr-africa

Quick start

# list the verified languages
google-asr-africa list-languages

# transcribe a folder of audio (resumable, rate-limited)
google-asr-africa transcribe data/amharic_clips --language amharic

from google_asr_africa import transcribe_folder

tr = transcribe_folder('data/kirundi_clips', language='rn', rpm=50)
print(tr.stats)                        # {'ok': 120, 'unknown': 3, ...}
text = tr.transcripts['clip_00042.flac']

Batches are crash-safe: a rerun continues where a stopped run left off and retries only transient failures.

Verify a new language

google-asr-africa probe rg --audio my_kiraundi.wav
# SUPPORTED / UNSUPPORTED / REVIEW(<actual-language>)

REST API + test UI

google-asr-africa serve          # http://localhost:8000

• GET / — browser UI (pick language, upload a clip, see the transcript)
• GET /health — liveness check
• GET /languages — the verified catalog as JSON
• POST /transcribe?language=<code> — send raw audio bytes, get JSON back

curl -X POST --data-binary @clip.flac -H 'Content-Type: audio/flac' \
     'localhost:8000/transcribe?language=amharic'

Run it in Docker (no external deps beyond Python):

docker build -t google-asr-africa .
docker run -p 8000:8000 google-asr-africa

Verified languages

Amharic, Chichewa, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Ndebele, Oromo, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Shona, Swahili, Swati, Tigrinya, Tsonga, Twi, Venda, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu. Run list-languages for the full table.

License

MIT — covers this code only. Google's ASR service and its outputs are subject to Google's Terms of Service.

Part of AfriSpeech — open-source tools for African language technology.