title: Audio File to Text Using SAPI or Equally Capable SR
body: <p>First let me explain my goal. The goal I'm working towards is providing an input .wav file, sending it into some kind of Speech Recognition API, and returning a text file with the transcription. The application I have in mind is very simple. I do not require that it be parsed for grammar or punctuation. It can return a big, long sentence -- that's fine. I will treat each transcribed word as an observation in a text file (.tsv or .csv format)</p>
  
  <p>However, the one tricky bit of data <em>(tricky because 95% of all 3rd party audio transcription services I've reviewed don't provide this kind of data to the user)</em> that I do need is the [0.00 - 1.00] confidence score of each word the SR takes its guess on. I would like to store that data in a new column of the text file that contains the transcribed text either in .tsv or .csv format. </p>
  
  <p>That's it. That's my goal. It seems my goal is possible: here is a quote from an expert in a related post:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738804/convert-audiowav-file-to-text-using-sapi">Convert Audio(Wav file) to Text using SAPI?</a></p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>SAPI can certainly do what you want. Start with an in-proc recognizer,
    connect up your audio as a file stream, set dictation mode, and off
    you go.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>and here is the relevant documentation for .wav transcription confidence scores:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127911.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127911.aspx</a></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.speech.recognition.recognizedwordunit.confidence(v=office.14).aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.speech.recognition.recognizedwordunit.confidence(v=office.14).aspx</a></p>
  
  <p>Everyone makes it sound so simple, but now let me explain the problem; why I'm posting a question. The problem is that, for me, my goal is out of reach because I know next to nothing about c++ or COM. I thought that SAPI was part of the everday windows experience and had a dedicated, friendly user interface. So I grew increasingly alarmed the more I researched this procedure. However I still believe that in principle this is a very simple thing, so I'm optimistic.</p>
  
  <p>I have knowledge in Python and a little JS. I know Python has code magic for other languages, so I'm sure Python can interface with SAPI this way, but since I don't know c++, I don't think that would make me any better off.</p>
  
  <p>So just to reiterate, despite the skill mismatch, I'm still partial to SAPI because all the user friendly alternatives, like Dragon, Nuance, Chrome plug-ins, ect, don't provide the data granularity I need.</p>
  
  <p>Now let me get to the heart of my question: </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Can someone give me their assessment on the difficulty of my "goal" as described above? Could it be done in a single .bat file? Example code would be greatly appreciated.</li>
  </ol>