7.3 Speech Recognition
Speech recognition turns spoken audio into text. Text-to-speech does the reverse.
Chapter 7: Major Areas of AI
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) converts your voice into text. Sound waves are turned into a visual-like representation (a spectrogram), and a model works out which sounds and words they match.
It's behind voice assistants, voice typing, live captions and meeting transcription. OpenAI's Whisper model, for example, was trained on 680,000 hours of audio across many languages.
The flip side is text-to-speech (TTS), which turns text into natural-sounding voices - used in audiobooks, navigation apps and accessibility tools.
Key takeaways
ASR = speech → text
TTS = text → speech
Powers assistants, captions and transcription