Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Getting started with Amazon Transcribe

Before you can create transcriptions, you have a few prerequisites:

Once you complete these prerequisites, you're ready to transcribe. Select your preferred transcription method from the following list to get started.

Because streaming using HTTP/2 and WebSockets is more complicated than the other transcription methods, we recommend reviewing the Setting up a streaming transcription section before getting started with these methods. Note that we strongly recommend using an SDK for streaming transcriptions.

Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account

If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account, use the following procedure to create one.

Amazon sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to http://www.amazonaws.cn/ and choosing My Account.

Secure IAM users

After you sign up for an Amazon Web Services account, safeguard your administrative user by turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA). For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for an IAM user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

To give other users access to your Amazon Web Services account resources, create IAM users. To secure your IAM users, turn on MFA and only give the IAM users the permissions needed to perform their tasks.

For more information about creating and securing IAM users, see the following topics in the IAM User Guide:

Installing the Amazon CLI and SDKs

To use the Amazon Transcribe API, you must first install the Amazon CLI. The current Amazon CLI is version 2. You can find installation instructions for Linux, Mac, Windows, and Docker in the Amazon Command Line Interface User Guide.

Once you have the Amazon CLI installed, you must configure it for your security credentials and Amazon Web Services Region.

If you want to use Amazon Transcribe with an SDK, select your preferred language for installation instructions:

Creating an Amazon S3 bucket

Amazon S3 is a secure object storage service. Amazon S3 stores your files (called objects) in containers (called buckets).

To run a batch transcription, you must first upload your media files into an Amazon S3 bucket. If you don't specify an Amazon S3 bucket for your transcription output, Amazon Transcribe puts your transcript in a temporary Amazon-managed Amazon S3 bucket. Transcription output in Amazon-managed buckets is automatically deleted after 90 days.

Learn how to Create your first S3 bucket and Upload an object to your bucket.

Creating an IAM policy

To manage access in Amazon, you must create policies and attach them to IAM identities (users, groups, or roles) or Amazon resources. A policy defines the permissions of the entity it is attached to. For example, a role can only access a media file located in your Amazon S3 bucket if you've attached a policy to that role which grants it access. If you want to further restrict that role, you can instead limit its access to a specific file within an Amazon S3 bucket.

To learn more about using Amazon policies see:

For example policies you can use with Amazon Transcribe, see Amazon Transcribe identity-based policy examples. If you want to generate custom policies, consider using the Amazon Policy Generator.

You can add a policy using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDK. For instructions, see Adding and removing IAM identity permissions.

Policies have the format:

JSON

{
    "Version":"2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "my-policy-name",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "service:action"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "amazon-resource-name"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify all Amazon resources, such as an Amazon S3 bucket. You can use ARNs in your policy to grant permissions for specific actions to use specific resources. For example, if you want to grant read access to an Amazon S3 bucket and its sub-folders, you can add the following code to your trust policy's Statement section:

{
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": [
            "s3:GetObject",
            "s3:ListBucket"
        ],
        "Resource": [
            "arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket",
            "arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket/*"
        ]
}

Here's an example policy that grants Amazon Transcribe read (GetObject, ListBucket) and write (PutObject) permissions to an Amazon S3 bucket, amzn-s3-demo-bucket, and its sub-folders:

JSON

{
  "Version":"2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws-cn:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket",
                "arn:aws-cn:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket/*"
            ]
        },
        {
             "Effect": "Allow",
             "Action": [
                 "s3:PutObject"
             ],
             "Resource": [
                 "arn:aws-cn:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket",
                 "arn:aws-cn:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket/*"
             ]
        }
  ]
}