Deploying hints

Important: Hinting content is internal only. Hinting has been fully deprecated as a feature by OOV.

Hinting enables ASR to avoid anticipated errors by providing hints as to what is likely to be said. Using the API, different hints can be provided to each transcription session, or the same hints can be applied to an entire group of calls, such as those from the same line of business. In the V‑Spark UI, hints are options applied to a specific folder, so adding an audio file to a specific folder applies a specific set of hints.

The following sections describe how to deploy hints in V‑Blaze, V‑Cloud, and V‑Spark.

Deploying hints to V‑Blaze

To deploy a hints file to one or more ASR servers, save a plain text version of the hints file and place it in the corresponding acoustic model hints directory of each ASR server. In the example below, the hints are assumed to have been created for use with a language model using the eng1 acoustic model.

/opt/voci/state/hints/eng1

Note: Adding a hints file to the server requires root access.

You can deploy as many hints files as needed, but they must all have different names. All files must use the .hints extension. After placing the files, ensure that all users have read permissions for the files.

Once deployed, activate the hint file by specifying its name in the transcription API call. The following example is a curl statement that will post the audio file callX.wav to ASR engine serverName with the hints file mycompany.hints specified, receive the transcript in JSON format, and save it as a file located within the current working directory callX.json.

curl -F hints="$(</path/to/mycompany.hints)" \
     -F file=@callX.wav \
     http://vblaze_name:17171/transcribe -o callX.json

Deploying hints to V‑Cloud

To deploy a hints file using V‑Cloud, the hints must be provided with the V‑Cloud transcription request explicitly as the value of the hints field. The value is expressed in a literal JSON hints string,

The following is an example curl statement that transcribes the audio file sample.wav and includes a hints tag with the value expressed as a literal JSON string. This example assumes the other template is visible to the ASR engine.

curl -F "file=@sample.wav;type=audio/x-wav" \
       -F "token=4A88...99BC" \
       -F "hints={“other” : [ “Joe's Hardware” ], "templates" : ["<other>"]}" \
       -X POST https://vcloud.vocitec.com/transcribe

Deploying hints to V‑Spark

To deploy hints using V‑Spark, the hints need to be provided as the ASR hints option to the corresponding V‑Spark folder. Assuming the hints file has already been deployed directly on the V‑Blaze servers, the value of hints is simply the file name of the corresponding hints file. In the example below, samples.hints is assumed to have been deployed to the V‑Blaze servers serving V‑Spark.

Assuming the hints file is not resident on the V‑Blaze server(s), the hints ASR option value can be expressed in one of two ways:

Provide a literal JSON hints string.
Redirect the contents of a plain text hints file that is locally available on the V‑Spark server. Redirection is indicated by placing < before the file name.

The following example shows the ASR option configuration specifying the use of hints as a literal JSON string:

V-Spark update folder ASR options dialog

The following example shows the ASR option configuration specifying hints and referencing samples.hints located in the /customer/apex/hints/ folder of the V‑Spark server.

Root access to the V‑Spark server is not strictly required; however, it is necessary that the hints file be readable by the vocisrv user and the path to the hints file be accessible to the vocisrv user. Depending upon where the hints file is placed, root access may be required to adjust path permissions.

For more information about working with folders in V‑Spark, refer to the Folder Management section of the Management Guide. Hinting is one of several ASR Options that may be configured for a folder.