How to return one alternative (with highest confidence) without returning all the options?

[sapienza88]

I want to expedite the recognition step which I use as follows:

self.recognizer.recognize_google(audio, language="English",show_all=False)

and returns many possibilities which I don't want.

I instead want to have one result (the one with highest confidence)

show_all=False doesn't actually do that

how to do that?

[alpha819beta]

show_all=False is somewhat misleading in the SpeechRecognition wrapper. It does not tell Google to generate only one recognition candidate; it only returns the first transcript from the response.
If you want the “best” result, the proper way is to request all alternatives and then select the one with the highest confidence score yourself. In practice, Google often already orders the alternatives by confidence, so the first entry is usually the most likely transcription anyway.
Also, disabling show_all does not noticeably speed up recognition. The main delay usually comes from network communication and Google’s processing time, not from returning multiple alternatives. If performance is the real concern, shortening the audio input and removing silence generally has a much larger impact.