How Does Voice to Text Work?
Voice to text technology has allowed users to speak into their device allowing for their words to be written out. This technology has not only been helpful for users who struggle to type or have their hands full, but has also allowed for new technologies such as voice assistants and AI to excel to new heights. While this technology has exponentially grown, not many have questioned exactly how this technology works. Today, we are going to explore this technological wonder, and to many peoples surprise, it is not as simple as it may seem.
How can a computer convert speech?
When you speak, your voice creates sound waves—those squiggly lines you see in the image on the right. The computer uses a microphone to capture these waves and breaks them down into tiny pieces. It then matches these pieces to patterns it has learned from many examples of speech. In simple terms, it “sees” the shape of your sound (like the waves in the image) and knows which word the shape represents. The image is a spectrograph showing the sound waves your voice makes which the computer interprets. The sound waves show someone saying "Row row your boat gently down the stream."
There are four simple steps that the computer goes through in order to process your speech, which is based primarily on the interpretation of the spectrograph waves, as shown above. Here is a four step breakdown:
Step by step breakdown of how speech to text works:
Step 1: Listening To Your Voice
The technology captures your speech through a microphone and converts it into a digital audio signal.
Step 2: Learning From Speech
It has been trained on large collections of audio and text, so it knows how different sounds (phonemes) correspond to letters and words.
Step 3: Matching Sounds To Words
The AI compares the audio to what it learned, recognizes words, and figures out their order and context.
Step 4: Displaying Text
The recognized words are arranged into text, which is then shown on your screen as the final output.
Conclusion
It is important to question exactly how things work in todays advanced society. Many of us just accept technological change without even thinking about it works. It is crazy to think that the computer can decipher sound waves from our voices to make up what each word is. It is almost like the human mind. If you would like to learn more about how voice to text technology works, its origins, and how to use it on mobile and desktop applications, be sure to check out our new course Voice to Text Basics, which is now live!
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