What is Voice Recognition?  

What is Voice Recognition?

These optimal conditions usually means the test subjects have 1) matching speaker characteristics with the training data, 2) proper speaker adaptation, and 3) clean environment (e.g. office space). (This explains why some users, especially accented, might actually find that the recognition rate could be perceptually much lower than the expected 98% to 99%).

Other, limited vocabulary, systems requiring no training can recognize a small number of words (for instance, the ten digits) from most speakers. Such systems are popular for routing incoming phone calls to their destinations in large organizations.

Voice recognition is the process by which a computer (or other type of machine) identifies spoken words. Basically, it means talking to your computer, AND having it correctly recognize what you are saying.

The performance of a voice recognition systems is usually specified in terms of accuracy and speed. Accuracy is measured with the word error rate, whereas speed is measure with the real time factor.

Most voice recognition users would tend to agree that dictation machines can achieve very high performance in controlled conditions. Part of the confusion mainly comes from the mixed usage of the term voice recognition and dictation.

Speaker-dependent dictation systems requiring a short period of training can capture continuous speech with a large vocabulary at normal pace with a very high accuracy. Most commercial companies claim that recognition software can achieve between 98% to 99% accuracy (getting one to two words out of one hundred wrong) if operated under optimal conditions.