Migration guide: AWS Transcribe to AssemblyAI
This guide walks through the process of migrating from AWS Transcribe to AssemblyAI.
Get Started
Before we begin, make sure you have an AssemblyAI account and an API key. You can sign up for a free account and get your API key from your dashboard.
Side-by-side code comparison
Below is a side-by-side comparison of a basic snippet to transcribe a file by AWS Transcribe and AssemblyAI:
AWS Transcribe
AssemblyAI
Installation
AWS Transcribe
AssemblyAI
When migrating from AWS to AssemblyAI, you’ll first need to handle authentication and SDK setup:
Get your API key from your AssemblyAI dashboard
Check our documentation for the full list of available SDKs
Things to know:
- Store your API key securely in an environment variable
- API key authentication works the same across all AssemblyAI SDKs
Audio File Sources
AWS Transcribe
AssemblyAI
Here are helpful things to know when migrating your audio input handling:
- There’s no need to specify the audio format to AssemblyAI - it’s auto-detected. AssemblyAI accepts almost every audio/video file type: here is a full list of all our supported file types
- Our SDK handles file upload and transcription automatically in one step
- For S3 files, you’ll need to generate pre-signed URLs (see example in cookbook)
Basic Transcription
AWS Transcribe
AssemblyAI
Here are helpful things to know about our transcribe
method:
- The SDK handles polling under the hood
- Transcript is directly accessible via
transcript.text
- English is the default language if none is specified
- We have a cookbook for error handling common errors when using our API.
Adding Features
AWS Transcribe
AssemblyAI
Key differences:
- Use
aai.TranscriptionConfig
to specify any extra features that you wish to use - The results for Speaker Diarization are stored in
transcript.utterances
. To see the full transcript response object, refer to our API Reference. - Check our documentation for our full list of available features and their parameters