Audio Recognition overview (TTS, STT, Voice .vs. Speech)
Yeti brand of USB microphone by the “Blue Microphones” company. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is still in many ways the early days of innovation in the several sub-categories of Audio Recognition.
Microphones
Thanks to technological advancements, microphones have become smaller and smaller (perhaps to some extent this has been driven by the post-war and Cold War eras where espionage became so critical, so governments worldwide competed producing better and better audio recording technologies). Either way, a good Microphone is the key technology to ensuring high-quality accuracy & results. While software solutions are increasingly capable of making due with embedded microphones (such as the commodity grade ones that tend to come installed in Mobile Phones, Laptops or other devices), a good external Microphone is essential for high accuracy. Examples of external microphones include wearable headsets or standalone mics connected via Bluetooth, USB cable or Analog/Digital cords. The technology has now improved to the point that the average person can produce audio on par with that of major production studios, all within a reasonable budget.
Speech Recognition
What was said?
Bell Labs pioneered advancements in this area with the creation of the first Text-To-Speech (TTS) technologies, and later Speech-To-Text (STT) during part of their ____ projects in the 19??’s.
Voice Recognition
Who said it?
Security companies have started adding Voice Recognition capabilities to their systems since _____ .
Agents
Something the Semantic Web promised but had not initially delivered on was an emergence of Intelligent Agents (i.e. code-powered Personal Assistants). Today, we finally see some of this promise being realized through things like Siri by Apple, Cortana by Microsoft, “Now!” by Google and Alexa/Echo by Amazon.
Web APIs
Microsoft has offered Windows-specific OS-level Speech API (SAPI) since WindowsXP and developers have been integrating Voice/Speech into their Windows apps for a while now, but now it will soon also offer web-based APIs through the announcement of “Project Oxford”. Project Oxford is aimed at building a set of intelligent services to support information retrieval which can optionally tie into the Bing Search APIs (which supports queries by content type including Web, News, Images, Video, )