Speech recognition technology has evolved significantly since its inception at Bell Labs in the 1950s, becoming increasingly important with the rise of personal assistants like Siri and Alexa. In Python, developers have access to open-source libraries such as wav2letter and Mozilla DeepSpeech for speech-to-text conversion, though they often face challenges related to accuracy and usability. AssemblyAI offers a free API specifically designed to address these issues by providing fast, automatic transcription services. A detailed tutorial demonstrates how to use the AssemblyAI API to transcribe audio and video files in Python, requiring minimal code. It guides users through obtaining an API key, setting up a Jupyter Notebook, and writing a script that uploads an audio file, requests transcription, and saves the resulting text. The tutorial also extends this process into a command-line tool that automatically polls the transcription endpoint until completion, showcasing AssemblyAI's capabilities in automating speech recognition tasks.