Speech Recognition Overview

Speech recognition technologies have quietly proliferated throughout the consumer hardware & software technology landscape over the last decade. In a consumer context, it’s easy to think of speech recognition as little more than a useful gimmick, resigned to helping us find out the day’s weather or record our shopping lists on the fly. This consumer application of speech recognition is only the tip of the iceberg, however. Speech recognition has exciting commercial applications, offering enterprises the ability to transcribe audio more efficiently into plain text and derive meaningful insights from it.

The Cloudmersive Speech Recognition API leverages deep-learning artificial intelligence to transcribe audio files into plain text, and it supports either MP3 or WAV file input. With the Cloudmersive Speech Recognition API, speech-to-text can begin to play a supplementary role in your business’ content moderation efforts. Further, it can transform the way your business extracts value from lectures, interviews, and other industry events where spoken language dominates the playing field, and it can even increase the access that physically impaired website visitors or employees have to your online resources.

Speech Recognition for Content Moderation

Nearly all forms of externally sourced media pose some risk to your system, whether from a security or NSFW (not safe for work) point of view. Image and video files, for example, are not just at risk of containing viruses and malware – they can contain pornography or racy material as well, which can leave your business in a sticky legal situation. Valid audio files can similarly hide NSFW policy breaches, and that content can go undetected if an effective audio content moderation solution is not introduced. Speech recognition technology plays a pivotal role in moderating audio content, providing the means to transcribe audio into plain text for subsequent NSFW text analysis. By incorporating a combination of Cloudmersive Speech Recognition and NLP (Natural Language Processing) APIs, your business can rapidly uncover profanity, hate speech and other forms of inappropriate language or harassment hiding within the waves of an audio file.

Speech Recognition for Speech-To-Text Analysis

Content moderation isn’t the only reason to convert speech to text. Audio files can arrive in your database as raw recordings of lectures, speeches, interviews, or other impromptu oratory from relevant industry events. Speech-to-text deeply enhances the value of such audio, first by cutting out the need to take attention-diverting notes at the event itself (or waste precious time manually transcribing audio recordings later). The automatically transcribed text from such audio files not only creates a better form of storage redundancy & search optimization for its recorded contents, but it also opens a door to analyze the extracted text more efficiently and derive deeper insights from it. For example, text can be processed through your Cloudmersive Sentiment Analysis API to classify if the speaker had a positive, negative, or neutral feeling towards a given subject. In the same way, it can undergo Subjectivity Analysis to help identify the degree to which the speaker might’ve been subjective or objective regarding their topic. If two lecturers spoke on the same subject, Semantic Similarity Analysis can be applied to determine the degree to which they might’ve meant the same or different things based on the phrasing they employed. Deploying our Speech APIs in conjunction with your Cloudmersive NLP APIs can transform the value of your recorded audio and establish the value of its content.

Speech Recognition for Physically Impaired Users

In the context of both consumer and commercial technology, Speech Recognition can be leveraged to assist people who are managing short or long-term physical impairments. By providing a means of transforming dictated audio into text, your business can empower those who are physically unable to type effectively on a keyboard and expand their access to important resources. This application of Speech Recognition can help transform the way your business interacts with its users and employees alike.