Speech recognition is a technology that allows spoken input into systems. You talk to your computer, phone or device and it uses what you said as input to trigger some action. The technology is being used to replace other methods of input like typing, clicking or selecting in other ways. It is a means to make devices and software more user-friendly and to increase productivity.

There are plenty of applications and areas where speech recognition is used, including the military, as aid for impaired persons (imagine a person with crippled or no hands or fingers), in the medical field, in robotics etc.

In the near future, nearly everyone will be exposed to speech recognition due to its propagation among common devices like computers and mobile phones.

For example, certain phones, or rather smartphones, can initiate a call to a contact by just getting spoken instructions like ‘Call office’. Other commands may also be entertained, like ‘Switch on Bluetooth’. The iPhone 5 is a good example of this.

Speech recognition, in its version known as Speech to Text (STT), has also been used for a long time to translate spoken words into text. “You talk, it types”, as ViaVoice would say on its box. But there is one problem with STT as we know it. More than 10 years back, I tried ViaVoice and it did not last a week on my computer. Why? It was grossly inaccurate and I ended up spending more time and energy speaking and correcting than typing everything. ViaVoice is one of the best in the industry, so imagine the rest. The technology has matured and improved, but speech to text still makes people ask questions.

One of its main difficulties is the immense variations among people in pronouncing words.

Speech recognition is proving to be better off as an input method for new phones and communication technologies like VoIP, than as a productivity tool for mass text input.