IBM Watson Speech-to-Text authentication credentials

Question

I am trying to run the speech to text example recipe for my TJBot. The sample config.js file needs a username and password from IBM to authenticate the service. However, IBM seems to be migrating to a API key based authentication system, and does not provide any username/password pairs. How can I connect to the service?

Answer 1

It seems you are referencing this config.js as part of this TJBot recipe . Indeed are all the IBM Cloud services including the Watson services moving to an IAM-based authentication. Here is the Node.js API for Speech-to-Text on authentication which offers this way to authenticate in addition to username / password:

var speechToText = new SpeechToTextV1({
    iam_apikey: '{iam_api_key}',
    url: '{url}'
  });

Based on the layout of config.js and that API, the TTS part in your config.js should look like this:

// Watson Speech to Text
// https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/speech-to-text/
exports.credentials.speech_to_text = {
    iam_apikey: 'YOUR-API-KEY',
    url: 'URL-FOR-SERVICE'
};

Answer 2

The STT recipe works now. Thanks to data_henrik for pointing out the required config.js edit. Besides editing the config file, I also edited node_modules/tjbot/lib/tjbot.js at line 381 and commented out the following block:

//assert(credentials.hasOwnProperty('username'), "credentials for the " + service + " service missing 'username'");
//assert(credentials.hasOwnProperty('password'), "credentials for the " + service + " service missing 'password'");
    //var SpeechToTextV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text/v1');
         //this._stt = new SpeechToTextV1({
         //  username: credentials['username'],
         // password: credentials['password'
         // url: 'https://stream.watsonplatform.net/speech-to-text/api/',
         // version: 'v1'
         // });
         // break;`

and replaced it with this:

var SpeechToTextV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text/v1');
     this._stt = new SpeechToTextV1({
     iam_apikey: credentials['iam_apikey'],
     url: 'https://gateway-syd.watsonplatform.net/speech-to-text/api',
     version: 'v1'
});
break;`

Answer 3

@data_henrik you solution may work. But a better solution is to edit the config.js directly as follows (note the keywork is apikey, not iam_apikey):

// Watson Speech to Text
// https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/speech-to-text/
exports.credentials.speech_to_text = {
    apikey: 'YOUR-API-KEY',
    url: 'URL-FOR-SERVICE'
};