Deploying Voice Gateway with the Speech to Text Adapter to Kubernetes in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Before you begin

• Familiarize yourself with Voice Gateway deployment options and deploy a basic environment as described in Getting started with Voice Gateway.

• If you're implementing a self-service agent, find and make note of the credentials for your instances of the following Watson services:

  • Watson Assistant
  • Text to Speech

  You will not need a Speech to Text service instance.

• Sign up for Google Cloud, and follow the Cloud Speech API Quickstart documentation to complete the following steps:

  1. Create a Google Cloud project that enables Cloud Speech API.
  2. Create a service account for the project.
  3. Download the private key JSON file, which contains credentials for your service account.

Deploying the Speech to Text Adapter to a Kubernetes cluster in IBM Cloud

The following instructions assume that you have already successfully deployed a basic Voice Gateway environment to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud. For complete setup information for getting started in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, see Deploying Voice Gateway to Kubernetes in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

1. In your local clone of the sample.voice.gateway repository, find the stt-adapter/kubernetes/bluemix/single-tenant/deploy.json Kubernetes deployment file, and copy it to your Voice Gateway deployment directory.

   The deploy.json file contains the configuration information for the Media Relay (vgw-media-relay), SIP Orchestrator (vgw-sip-orchestrator), and Speech to Text Adapter (stt-adapter) containers. The env object for each container contains a list of name-value pairs, which each correspond with the configuration environment variables.

2. For self-service agents, open the deploy.json file and fill in the following Watson service credentials.

   • vgw-media-relay container: Specify the Text to Speech username credential in the WATSON_TTS_USERNAME variable.
   • vgw-sip-orchestrator container: Specify the Watson Assistant workspace ID and username credential in the WATSON_CONVERSATION_WORKSPACE_ID and WATSON_CONVERSATION_USERNAME variables.

   Important: Do not specify the password credentials for the services within in the file. To secure your credentials, you will create a Kubernetes secret.

   For example:

   {
     "name": "WATSON_TTS_USERNAME",
     "value": "9h7f54cb-5epb-80d6-45c3-da41d2bf7a71"
   }
   

3. Create a Kubernetes secret to store the password credentials for the Text to Speech and Watson Assistant services.

   To create the secret, run the kubectl create secret generic secret-creds command. Use the --from-literal option to specify the password credential for each service on the WATSON_TTS_PASSWORD and WATSON_CONVERSATION_PASSWORD environment variables.

   For example:

   kubectl create secret generic secret-creds \
   --from-literal=WATSON_TTS_PASSWORD='rkxF6JIpLDz' --from-literal=WATSON_CONVERSATION_PASSWORD='prqNfi8Dsj'
   

   This secret can be reused each time you redeploy Voice Gateway. You only need to recreate the secret if you change service instances.

4. Create a Kubernetes secret to store the credentials JSON file that you downloaded from your Google Cloud project. Use the --from-file option to specify the path to the Google credentials file.

   For example:

   kubectl create secret generic google-credentials --from-file=/Users/user1/my-google-project-f4b426929b20.json
   

5. Mount the Google credentials file to the deployment by specifying the name of the file in the volumes section of the deploy.json file.

   For example:

   {
    ...
    "volumes": [
      {
          "name": "google-credentials",
          "secret": {
            "secretName": "google-credentials",
            "items": [{
              "key": "my-google-project-f4b426929b20.json",
              "path": "my-google-project-f4b426929b20.json"
            }]
          }
        }
    ]
   }
   

6. Under the stt-adapter container, specify the Google credentials file location in the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.

   For example:

     {
       "name": "GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS",
       "value": "/stt-adapter/credentials/my-google-project-f4b426929b20.json"
     }
   

7. Create and deploy a Kubernetes pod that contains the Voice Gateway containers by specifying your deployment file on the kubectl create command.

   kubectl create -f deploy.json
   

   Running this command deploys one Voice Gateway pod on a single worker node within a Kubernetes cluster.

What to do next

You can further configure your Voice Gateway deployment by editing the deploy.json file to add or change configuration variables and then redeploying your pod.