How To Receive Answer From Google Assistant As A String, Not As An Audio Stream

I am using the python libraries from the Assistant SDK for speech recognition via gRPC. I have the speech recognized and returned as a string calling the method resp.result.spoken_

Solution 1:

Currently (Assistant SDK Developer Preview 1), there is no direct way to do this. You can probably feed the audio stream into a Speech-to-Text system, but that really starts getting silly.

Speaking to the engineers on this subject while at Google I/O, they indicated that there are some technical complications on their end to doing this, but they understand the use cases. They need to see questions like this to know that people want the feature.

Hopefully it will make it into an upcoming Developer Preview.

Solution 2:

Update: for

google.assistant.embedded.v1alpha2

the assistant SDK includes the field supplemental_display_text

which is meant to extract the assistant response as text which aids the user's understanding

or to be displayed on screens. Still making the text available to the developer. Goolge assistant documentation