Twilio trail account do not have speech-to-text feature

Question

I have a twilio trail account number. I want to know whether speech recognition feature is disabled for trail accounts.

I tried to capture speech using Gather verb. but it does not work.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

I think the issue here is that the <Gather> is not setup to hear the caller if they start speaking during the <Say> portion of the call.

Your TwiML from the code you shared looks a bit like this:

<Response>
  <Say>Welcome to Twilio, please tell us why you're calling</Say>
  <Gather input="speech" timeout="5" action="https://f2b4fbc1.ngrok.io/asr/test"></Gather>
</Response>

So, the <Gather> only starts listening once the <Say> is complete.

Instead, you should nest the <Say> within the <Gather> to make TwiML like this:

<Response>
  <Gather input="speech" timeout="5" action="https://f2b4fbc1.ngrok.io/asr/test">
    <Say>Welcome to Twilio, please tell us why you're calling</Say>
  </Gather>
</Response>

The code for this should look like:

Say say = new Say.Builder("Welcome to Twilio, please tell us why you're calling").build();  
Gather gather = new Gather.Builder().input(Gather.Input.SPEECH).timeout(5).action("https://f2b4fbc1.ngrok.io/asr/test").say(say).build();       
VoiceResponse response = new VoiceResponse.Builder().gather(gather).build();

Let me know if that helps at all.

[edit]

I also believe that you need to be setting the content type when you return the XML. I'm not a Spring/Java developer, but here's what I think you need to change

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, value = "/recordTheSpeech", produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_XML_VALUE)
public ResponseEntity<String> recordTheSpeech() throws IOException {
    Say say = new Say.Builder("Welcome to Twilio, please tell us why you're calling").build();
    Gather gather = new Gather.Builder().input(Gather.Input.SPEECH).timeout(5).action("https://f2b4fbc1.ngrok.io/asr/test").say(say).build();
    VoiceResponse response = new VoiceResponse.Builder().gather(gather).build();

    return new ResponseEntity.ok().body(response.toXml());
}