Speaking and talking to your electronic devices is commonplace nowadays. Years ago, on an early version of my smartphone, I clicked the microphone button and used its dictation function to try to speak an email into existence. The email that my boss received at work had a whole bunch of typos and phonetic errors, though, and he wondered whether I was mixing a little too much after-work activity with my official duties!
The world has evolved, and so has the accuracy of neural networks in performing automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is the process of transforming spoken audio into written text. Whether you are using your phone’s intelligent digital assistant to ask it to schedule a meeting for you, dictating that trusty email, or asking your smart device at home to order something, play background music, or even start your car, the tasks are powered by ASR functionality.