Using the Watson Speech to Text service in an iOS app with Bluemix

Question

We are creating an iOS application on Bluemix and we are trying to link the Speech to Text service. We've bound the service to the application, but now we don't know how to utilize the service within our app.

How do we use the Speech to Text API in our iOS app with our back end hosted on Bluemix?

Answer 1

You have two options:

1. You make the call to the Watson Speech to Text service directly from your iOS application. You can either invoke the REST API directly from your iOS app using something like RestKit , or you can use the Watson Speech iOS SDK to make that invocation easier.

2. You can send all the received audio to your app on Bluemix (serving as a mobile back end) and invoke the Speech to Text REST API from there. This will offload computation from the mobile device, but will most likely increase the latency of getting back the audio transcription to your mobile phone.

Answer 2

Additionally, there is now a Watson iOS SDK which includes the Speech to Text service. This seems like an ideal solution over using the REST API directly if you plan to do a lot of work with Watson.