Explore speech in Azure AI Foundry portal

The Azure AI Speech service transcribes speech into text, and text into audible speech. You might use AI Speech to create an application that can transcribe meeting notes or generate text from the recording of interviews.

In this exercise, you will use Azure AI Speech in Azure AI Foundry portal, Microsoft’s platform for creating intelligent applications, to transcribe audio using the built-in try-it-out experiences.

Create a project in Azure AI Foundry portal

  1. In a web browser, open the Azure AI Foundry portal at https://ai.azure.com and sign in using your Azure credentials. Close any tips or quick start panes that are opened the first time you sign in.

  2. In the browser, navigate to https://ai.azure.com/managementCenter/allResources and select Create. Then choose the option to create a new AI hub resource.

  3. In the Create a project wizard, enter a valid name for your project, and if an existing hub is suggested, select the option to create a new one.

  4. Expand Advanced options to specify the following settings for your project:
    • Subscription: Your Azure subscription
    • Resource group: Create or select a resource group
    • Region: Select one of the following locations:
      • East US
      • France Central
      • Korea Central
      • West Europe
      • West US

    Wait for your project and hub to be created.

  5. When the project is created, you will be taken to an Overview page of the project details.

  6. On the left-hand menu on the screen, select Playgrounds.

  7. On the Playgrounds page, select the Speech playground tile to try out some Azure AI Speech capabilities.

Explore speech to text in Azure AI Foundry’s Speech Playground

Let’s try out speech to text in Azure AI Foundry’s Speech Playground.

  1. On the Speech page, scroll down and select Real-time transcription under Try out Speech capabilities. You will be taken to the Speech Playground.

  2. Download speech.zip by opening the URL https://aka.ms/mslearn-speech-files in a new browser tab. Using the URL should automatically download a folder on your computer. Open the folder by navigating to the Downloads on your computer.

  3. In the Azure AI Foundry Speech portal, under Upload files, select Browse files and navigate to the folder where you saved the file. Select WhatAICanDo.m4a and then Open.

    Browse files

  4. The Speech service transcribes and displays the text in real time. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to the recording as the text is being transcribed.

  5. Review the output, which should have successfully recognized and transcribed the audio into text.

In this exercise you tried out Azure AI Speech services in Azure AI Foundry’s Speech Playground. You then used Real-time transcription to transcribe an audio recording. You were able to see the text transcription being generated as the audio file was played.

Clean up

If you don’t intend to do more exercises, delete any resources that you no longer need. This avoids accruing any unnecessary costs.

  1. Open the Azure portal and select the resource group that contains the resource you created.
  2. Select the resource and select Delete and then Yes to confirm. The resource is then deleted.

Learn more

This exercise demonstrated one of the many capabilities of the Speech service. To learn more about what you can do with this service, see the Speech page.