Is there a way to get the Google Cloud Speech API to recognize letters and letter sounds?
As an example use case, if I wanted to build a spelling game where a voice would say, "Spell restaurant" and the recognizer would listen for each letter and recognize them as they come through.
Similarly, is there a way to identify specific letter sounds like: "oo", "ew", "k" (as in cat) or "s" (as in circle).
It seems to already do a reasonable job at least in some cases. E.g., when I spell out "cee ay tee" it recognizes "c a t". It is also possible to provide "word hints" as described in this post:
Google Cloud Speech API word Hints
Supplying a list of single-letter "words" as hints, i.e.
phrases = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd' ... ]
appears to give improved results in this area.