Understanding speech recognition

Converting speech to text is an important application feature. This ability is increasingly being used in a wide variety of contexts. Voice input is used to control smart phones, automatically handle input as part of help desk applications, and to assist people with disabilities, to mention a few examples.

Speech consists of an audio stream that is complex. Sounds can be split into phones, which are sound sequences that are similar. Pairs of these phones are called diphones. Utterances consist of words and various types of pauses between them.

The essence of the conversion process involves splitting sounds by silences between utterances. These utterances are then matched to the words that most closely sound like the utterance. However, this can be difficult due to many factors. For example, these differences may be in the form of variances in how words are pronounced due to the context of the word, regional dialects, the quality of the sound, and other factors...