Azure Cognitive Services and Power Automate
I needed to transcribe some audio files to text. So, I took this as an opportunity to learn a bit about Azure Cognitive Services and figure out how to use Power Automate to complete this task.
You can download the Flow from here - https://link.freefall365.com/cognitiveservicesfiles.
Or from the Power Automate cookbook - https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Convert-Audio-Files-to-Text-Using-Azure-Cognitive-Services-Batch/td-p/441482
I documented the method I used to learn and summarised the steps taken in the following four short videos.
I found the whole process thoroughly enjoyable and felt empowered once I achieved my goal.
From a no-developer, I felt way out of my comfort zone at times, but by the end, I felt empowered and eager to learn more about cognitive services and Power Automate.
Now that I can use the HTTP Request action in Power Automate with the REST API in Azure Cognitive Services, what other Azure services can I use? The possibilities are HUGE!
Part 1: The Prerequisites.
In this part, I look at
What Service I Used How did I decide what steps to use in Power Automate?
What key info I took from the MS documentation
How I got a Cognitive services subscription key
How I got my audio file into Azure Blob storage and how I got the URL of that file
Where to find the correct REST API endpoint to use and where to see an example of the request I should send to it.
Part 2: Creating the Transcription Request
This part covers
How I used the HTTP Request action in Power Automate to create a Batch processing request in Azure Speech to Text service
What URI to use How to authenticate with Azure cognitive services What I used for the body of the request
What valuable information we get back from the request and how to analyse the output of the action in Power Automate
Part 3: Retrieving the Transcription request, checking the status and results
In this part I summarise
How I parsed the JSON response that we got back from the POST request.
How to retrieve the transcription
How I used the Do Until action in Power Automate to poll the transcription and check it's status periodically I did some housekeeping and deleted the Transcription from Azure Cognitive Services.
And finally how I analysed the output of a completed transcription request.
Part 4: The Results
And finally, in this part, I demonstrate the following -
How I parsed the JSON responses from getting a completed transcription
How I retrieved the transcription result from Azure Cognitive services
Some of the issues I obstacles I overcame while trying to analyse the output from our transcription result and get it into a format that I can save to a text file
How I saved the text file to OneDrive