Speech-to-text (STT)

The technology is also called automatic speech recognition (ASR). In a phone assistant it is the first step: only once it is clear what was said can the system reply. On the phone this is harder than with a dictation feature, because the audio is narrowband and background noise, dialects and poor connections come on top.

Errors occur especially with proper names, streets, email addresses and sequences of digits. Good systems therefore have important details confirmed or spelled out. Besides real-time recognition during the call there is transcription after the call, from which logs and summaries are produced. What counts for quality is therefore not only the error rate of a model but the result in your own use. Transcripts contain personal data and fall under data protection law.