What Is Voice Recognition and How Does Speech-to-Text AI Work?

We are currently using voice recognition more, now than ever. This is where your speech is taken, and turned into text. A few examples of this would include using it on WhatsApp and turning your voice note into text for you, or, when you end a Zoom call, it automatically writes a summary of the meeting, including the full transcription, or if you own an Alexa, voice recognition is what enables it process and respond to what you’re asking.

But how does it actually work?

How the Technology Actually Works

First, the AI listens by picking up your voice, it then breaks the sound into chunks, and tries to figure out which words match the sounds it’s hearing.

It’s not just matching words in isolation, it’s looking at the full sentence to understand what you likely meant. So it knows the difference between “they’re going to the shop” and “their new shop,” even though they sound almost identical.

Today’s systems are very advanced. They’ve been trained on thousands of hours of speech, allowing the AI to pick up on how people talk, including grammar, context, it can even understand different accents and speaking styles, although as you might know from yelling at Alexa one too many times, they still mess up, especially if the audio’s a bit unclear. 

Practical Business Applications

Chances are, you’ve probably already used voice recognition. Software's like Zoom and Otter.ai now transcribe meetings while you talk, so you don’t have to worry about taking notes. Call centres use it to log conversations for training and compliance… or at least they say that they do anyway. Content creators use it to turn their podcast interviews into blog posts amongst other stuff like auto-captioning their videos for social media.