Getting Started

How to get a Transcribe Server running on your system

Using Cobalt Transcribe

A typical Transcribe release, provided as a compressed archive, will contain a linux binary (transcribe-server) for the required native CPU architecture, appropriate Dockerfile and models.
Cobalt Transcribe runs either locally on linux or using Docker.
Cobalt Transcribe will serve the Transcribe GRPC API on port 2727. A web demo will be enabled on port 8080.
To quickly try out Transcribe, first start the server as shown below and open the web demo at http://localhost:8080 in your browser to send live microphone input or upload an audio file for transcription. You can also use the SDK to use Transcribe from within your application or just command line.

Info

The cobalt.license.key file will be provided separately that must be copied into the directory resulting from decompressing the archive. Please do this before running the steps below.

Running Transcribe Server Locally on Linux

./transcribe-server

By default, the binary assumes the presence of a configuration file, located in the same directory, named: transcribe-server.cfg.toml. A different config file may be specified using the --config argument.

Running Transcribe Server as a Docker Container

To build and run the Docker image for Transcribe, run:

docker build -t cobalt-transcribe .
docker run -p 2727:2727 -p 8080:8080 cobalt-transcribe

How to Get a Copy of the Transcribe Server and Models

Please contact us for finding a product release or Transcribe model best suited to your requirements.

The demo release you will receive is a compressed archive (tar.bz2) and is structured accordingly:

release.tar.bz2
├── COPYING
├── README.md
├── transcribe-server
├── transcribe-server.cfg.toml
├── cobalt.license.key
├── Dockerfile
├── models
│   └── en_US-16khz
├── formatters
│   └── en_US-16khz
│
└── cobalt.license.key [ provided separately, needs to be copied over ]

The README.md file contains information about this release and instructions for how to start the server on your system.
The transcribe-server is the server program which is configured using the transcribe-server.cfg.toml file.
The Dockerfile can be used to create a container that will let you run Transcribe server on non-linux systems such as MacOS and Windows.
The models and formatters directories contain your speech recognition and text formatting models. The content of these directories will depend on the models you downloaded.

System Requirements

Cobalt Transcribe runs on Linux. You can run it directly as a linux application, or using Docker.

You can evaluate the product on Windows or Linux using Docker Desktop but we would not recommend this setup for use in a production environment.

A Cobalt Transcribe release typically includes a single Transcribe model together with binaries and config files. The general purpose Transcribe models take up to 4GB disk space, and need a minimum of 4GB RAM when evaluating locally. For production workloads, we recommend configuring containerized applications with each instance allocated with 4 CPUs and 8GB RAM.

Cobalt Transcribe runs on x86_64 CPUs. We also support Arm64 CPUs, including processors such as the Graviton (AWS c7g EC2 instances). Transcribe is significantly more cost effective to run on C7g instances compared to similarly sized Intel or AMD processors, and we can provide you an Arm64 release on request.

To integrate Cobalt Transcribe into your application, please follow the next steps to Generate the SDK in a language of your choice.