Speech Recognition and Voice Recognition

- Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. 

Rudimentary speech recognition software has a limited vocabulary of words and phrases, and it may only identify these if they are spoken very clearly. More sophisticated software has the ability to accept natural speech, different accents and languages. Many modern devices or text-focused programs may have speech recognition functions in them to allow for easier or hands-free use of a device. 

Some speech recognition systems require "training" (also called "enrollment") where an individual speaker reads text or isolated vocabulary into the system. The system analyzes the person's specific voice and uses it to fine-tune the recognition of that person's speech, resulting in increased accuracy. Systems that do not use training are called "speaker independent" systems. Systems that use training are called "speaker dependent". 

From the technology perspective, speech recognition has a long history with several waves of major innovations. Most recently, the field has benefited from advances in deep learning and big data. The advances are evidenced not only by the surge of academic papers published in the field, but more importantly by the worldwide industry adoption of a variety of deep learning methods in designing and deploying speech recognition systems.

- Voice Recognition

voice recognition is a computer software program or hardware device with the ability to decode the human voice. Voice recognition is commonly used to operate a device, perform commands, or write without having to use a keyboard, mouse, or press any buttons. Today, this is done on a computer with ASR (automatic speech recognition) software programs. Many ASR programs require the user to "train" the ASR program to recognize their voice so that it can more accurately convert the speech to text. For example, you could say "open Internet" and the computer would open the Internet browser.  

The first ASR device was used in 1952 and recognized single digits spoken by a user (it was not computer driven). Today, ASR programs are used in many industries, including healthcare, military (e.g., F-16 fighter jets), telecommunications, and personal computing (i.e., hands-free computing).

- Speech Recognition vs. Voice Recognition

It is important to note the terms speech recognition and voice recognition are sometimes used interchangeably. However, the two terms mean different things. Speech recognition is used to identify words in spoken language. Voice recognition is a biometric technology used to identify a particular individual's voice or for speaker identification. 

The term voice recognition or speaker identification refers to identifying the speaker, rather than what they are saying. Recognizing the speaker can simplify the task of translating speech in systems that have been trained on a specific person's voice or it can be used to authenticate or verify the identity of a speaker as part of a security process. 

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