AI that listens to spoken words and turns them into written text.
Speech recognition turns the sound coming into a microphone into text. The AI chops the audio into tiny slices, reads the pattern of pitch and loudness in each one, and looks at the slices around it to decide which word it's hearing. That's why the same sound can be written differently depending on the rest of the sentence.
Accuracy jumped in the early 2010s when deep learning arrived. In 2022 a model called Whisper, trained on about 680,000 hours of audio, was released for anyone to download. It still slips up with background noise, strong accents and rare words.
Think of it like this
Think of "their", "there" and "they're". They sound the same, so the word on its own won't tell you which to write, but the whole sentence will. Speech recognition does the same: it listens to what comes before and after, then picks the most likely words.
For example
When you talk to your phone and the words appear in your message, that's speech recognition.
Records about this
Source-checked moments from AI history.
Commoditized multilingual ASR, making speech a standard input to LLM pipelines
Separate industry groups confirmed the same shift (HMM→DNN), and deep learning became the industry standard for speech recognition