Speech Recognition: How to turn Speech to Text without training

Do you want to convert speech to text without spending long hours for machine learning training? Or maybe you don't have powerful hardware with GPU acceleration? For sure you are not alone! Let's dive a little bit into the voice technology area, which has become a real game-changer lately.

What is speech recognition?

If you are pretty good with techy stuff, you are likely to know the basics of speech recognition, so let's skip to the good part, which is that with a little set-up and a little bit of effort, you can get a browser extension to make your browser text smarter. Here is an example of how you can use it: Can't read? Dial 1, hit Send, type it again. It is real, we see you: a software did the hard work for you! Using search engines to add keywords The web has become a very crowded space where everyone tries to compete for users' attention. To get a significant share of these users' time, you need to attract their attention because most of the user's time is spent there. So the evident approach would be to build a cool search engine (similar to Google).

What are the benefits of speech recognition?

Voice recognition, of course, makes it easier to search for information or to have voice assistance when your hands are busy making phone calls or sending text messages. The ability to have a conversation with someone can bring so many benefits to our daily lives. Sometimes talking to people can be difficult, as they are usually not easy to understand. But voice commands provide the possibility to make most users become speech users. By the way, did you know you can embed that voice commands into a website? Yes, I found a tool called Voxpow, which makes this possible and easy. How does speech recognition work? First, you need to install the application, and when you first open it, you will see the following image, which shows your current operation voice. It would help if you customized this, like to select a voice profile for your personal preferences.

How to convert voice to text without training

I often meet and speak with developers building voice bots or customer engagement platforms, and they are speedy to share their stories. "We spent months and months training the voice system with speech recognition software before we are ready to release the service. We took all the right actions. We designed the question and the content. But it was not enough. Still the system would not perform well." "We did not have the right infrastructure in place. We did not have sufficient computational power to train the system," they would continue. When we speak about converting speech to text, or text to speech, we are looking at a speech processing engine, which translates speech into textual form.

What are the limitations?

Certain limitations are not often discussed. To convert the speech to text, we need two things: - audio recording of the user (be they a phone or IoT appliance) - technology capable to process that recording into text These are the basic issues that we need to think about: What to record from the user? - this is an important question - there are two possibilities: - phone call - call from Skype or other VOIP software - Skype, Google Hangouts or similar software - phone from some voice application (for example smart speakers, where the audio from the microphone is sent to the cloud to process this into text) How to convert the recorded speech to text?

convert speech into a text

Conclusion

Soon the internet will be speech to text by default, with little effort from developers. I'm sure there will be lots of other remarkable new language technologies that will soon be mature, like the one described in this article. In the meantime, if you have a powerful system with GPU, give it a try, even with 10% of the machines right now. One last remark: One of my other favorite articles from Medium about Natural Language Understanding is about Parsec and Text_IO. I recommend you check it out, and feel free to share your thoughts on my previous post.