Speech to Text: Accurate AI Speech Recognition Online

What speech to text is, and how well it works

Speech to text, also called automatic speech recognition or ASR, is software that converts spoken language into written text. Modern systems use neural networks trained on huge amounts of speech, which is why accuracy improved so much in recent years. They no longer need to be trained on your voice, and they handle many accents and languages.

In practice the quality of a transcript depends on four things, in roughly this order: how clear the audio is, how many people are talking at once, how well the language and accent are represented, and how unusual the vocabulary is. Names, acronyms and technical terms are the words most worth a quick review.

Speech to text vs. transcription

The two terms overlap. Speech to text usually refers to the automatic conversion itself, often in real time. Transcription usually means producing a finished document from a recording, often with speaker labels, timestamps and some editing. HeyScribe does both, so you can use the same account for dictating a note and for transcribing an interview.

Making the most of speech to text

• Match the mode to the job. Live for talking now, files for recordings you have.
• Give it clean audio. This helps more than any other setting.
• Review what matters. Skim names, numbers and quotes before you share.
• Use the AI tools. Fix punctuation, clean up filler words and summarize in one click.

Curious how AI changes transcription? Read about AI transcription, or jump to transcribing audio and video.