Skip to Main Content
IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data & AI organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:


Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,


Post your ideas

Post ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,

  1. Post an idea

  2. Upvote ideas that matter most to you

  3. Get feedback from the IBM team to refine your idea


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com


Status Not under consideration
Workspace Speech Services
Created by Guest
Created on Jan 31, 2018

Improve API response structure for timestamps and word_confidence within STT SpeechRecognitionAlternative model

As part of the response from making  a POST to the v1/recognize endpoint in the Speech to Text service, the user receives an array of "alternatives". Within these "alternatives" objects, there are two arrays called "word_confidence" and "transcript". Below is an example of this piece of the response:

"alternatives": [
{
"transcript": "thunderstorms could produce",
    "confidence": 0.994,
    "word_confidence": [
    [
      "thunderstorms",
        1
    ],
[
      "could",
       1
     ],
      [
      "produce",
        1
      ],
   ],
   "timestamps": [
    [
"thunderstorms",
       1.49,
        2.32
     ],
      [
      "could",
        2.32,
       2.54
      ],
      [
      "produce",
        2.54,
        3.01
     ],
    ]
  }
]

The problem with this response is that both "word_confidence" and "timestamps" are arrays of arrays, even though the internal arrays have specific attributes at particular indices. As is, this response lends itself more to "word_confidence" and "timestamps" being arrays of objects like so:

"alternatives": [
{
"transcript": "thunderstorms could produce",
    "confidence": 0.994,
    "word_confidence": [
    {
      "thunderstorms",
        1
    },
{
      "could",
       1
     },
      {
      "produce",
        1
      },
   ],
   "timestamps": [
    {
"thunderstorms",
       1.49,
        2.32
     },
      {
      "could",
        2.32,
       2.54
      },
      {
      "produce",
        2.54,
        3.01
     },
    ]
  }
]

Added motivation for the change is that this is currently causing a problem with the API specification and, in turn, efforts to automatically generate code/documentation based on the API.

 

Currently, we are specifying the various Watson APIs based on the OpenAPI version 2.0 specification. These can be found here. The way the response is actually structured, with a nested array of mixed types, cannot be properly specified according to the specification, resulting in manual work to tweak code that may be generated from the Speech to Text API spec.

 

Overall, making the proposed change to the v1/recognize response in the Speech to Text service would both make more sense based on the structure, but would also make it easier to document and help further the effort to streamline API changes across all relevant tools.