aws.transcribe is a package for the AWS Transcribe API.

To start a transcription, use start_transcription() with a "job name" and the URL for the file to be transcribed:

library("aws.transcribe")
t1 <- start_transcription("aws-transcribe-example", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/randhunt-transcribe-demo-us-east-1/out.mp3")

Then, wait for the transcription to complete and retrieve it by name using get_transcription():

library("aws.transcribe")
t1 <- get_transcription("aws-transcribe-example")
cat(strwrap(t1$Transcriptions[1L], 60), sep = "\n")

## Hi, everybody. I'm Randall, and I wanted to show off some
## of the new features the Amazon transcribe. I'm cool. Like
## Noelle with the cake quote. What do you do? I'm an
## engineer. I work for Boeing satellites. Whoa, that's
## awesome. Are you excited for Arena in 2019? Yes. I can't
## wait to meet everyone evades. Are you excited for the
## musical guest? Who is gonna be? I have no idea that I'm not
## sure.

That's it!

To use the package, you will need an AWS account and to enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten. The aws.iam package profiles tools for working with IAM, including creating roles, users, groups, and credentials programmatically; it is not needed to use IAM credentials.

A detailed description of how credentials can be specified is provided at: https://github.com/cloudyr/aws.signature/. The easiest way is to simply set environment variables on the command line prior to starting R or via an Renviron.site or .Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables in R during startup (see ? Startup). They can be also set within R:

Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
           "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
           "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
           "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")

You can install this package from CRAN or, to install the latest development version, from the cloudyr drat repository:

# Install from CRAN
install.packages("aws.transcribe")

# Latest version passing CI tests, from drat repo
install.packages("aws.transcribe", repos = c(getOption("repos"), "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat"))

You can also pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub, using the remotes package:

remotes::install_github("cloudyr/aws.transcribe")