How to Setup 3CX Voicemail to Text Transcription

Once you’re signed into the Google Cloud Platform Console, from the menu on the left, choose ‘APIs and Services’, and from the pop out box, click ‘dashboard’ (If you’ve enabled Google APIs before, click ‘Library’ from the pop out box).

From here, click ‘Enable APIs and Services’. (You should already be on the correct page if you’ve already enabled APIs and Services in the past).

Once you’re on this page, you need to look for ‘Cloud Speech-to-Text API’. If it isn’t clear where this option is, you can search for it using the search function at the top.

The next screen you should be on will look like this.

Before anything else, you should look at the pricing lower down. There is a price for every minute that you use the speech to text API function, but you do get 60 minutes of free usage each month.

Knowing that, you can click the blue enable button for this API. This will create a cloud speech-to-text API.

The next step is to create an API credential which acts as the log on for your 3CX system to connect to the cloud speech-to-text service.

Go back to the dashboard, and click on the APIs and Services menu on the left and choose ‘Credentials’.

From here, at the top, you have the option to create a new credential, and from the drop down you need to select API key. 

This will then create an API key which you can copy and paste into your 3CX system.

We also suggest that you restrict the key. This is to make sure no other services besides your 3CX system can gain access to this service.

Now we need to create a name for this API key. We’ve called ours 3CX Speech-to-Text API Key.

Select ‘IP Address’ in terms of application restrictions.

Below these you’ll need to add your 3CX IP address. This is when you’ll have to access your 3CX system.

From the dashboard of your 3CX system. If you simply copy and paste your static public IP in, you’ll be keeping this particular service secure so that nobody else can access it.

Under the API restrictions, you need to select “restrict key” and select the name of the API that you created above (in our case “3CX Speech-to-Text API Key”).

Once you’ve completed these steps, you can press save.

Now you’ve got an API key with speech-to-text set up on the Google platform, which you can use within your 3CX system for transcription of voicemails.

You can now head over to your 3CX system, go to settings and select ‘voicemail’.

A little bit lower down on this page, you’ll see the option to use the transcription service.

Enable this and paste in the Google API key that was created in previous steps. There’s also a drop down to select what will be transcribed such as voicemails, recordings or both.

Now you should have text transcription setup for your 3CX voicemails.

Here we have an example of an email sent to us when we receieved a voicemail. We obviously receive an attached copy of the record voicemail along with a text transcription for us to easily read.

However, now that you’ll have a text version of the voicemail for you to read, you will rarely need to open the file to listen to it.