Speech to text

We keep talking faster than we type. So we want a way to turn sound into words without typing every letter. That’s where speech-to-text comes in.

Automatic speech recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is the name for software that listens and converts audio into text. AI does the heavy lifting here. She breaks sound waves into patterns, then matches them against known words. If she’s good, she can even figure out what we meant when we mumbled.

We don’t have to train her on our own voices. She’s been trained on thousands of hours of speech. So the system knows what “tomato” sounds like in ten different accents.

Language models

Once ASR guesses the raw words, language models step in. They predict the most likely next word, like autocomplete on steroids. AI looks at the whole sentence and decides whether we meant “recognize speech” or “wreck a nice beach.”

She doesn’t just parrot what she hears. She uses probability to clean things up. That’s why transcripts feel more natural than raw phonetic matches.

Everyday use

We already use this tech when we dictate a text on our phone. Or when closed captions pop up in real time during a meeting. AI quietly listens, fills in the blanks, and hands us a transcript.

It’s not flawless. Accents, background noise, and fast talk still trip her up. But she improves every time more people use her.

Our coder’s thought

We used to dream of computers that could understand us. Now we mostly grumble when she misses a word. That’s progress.