Why add speech recognition to your project
Speech recognition is a technology that uses a voice as the main interaction tool between a human and a digital product, application, or website.
Based on the software type, it analyzes human speech and could either turn it into text or execute a specific action.
The interest in speech recognition technology is growing: not only is it presented by mobile voice assistants & smart speakers we all use for search & hands-free commands execution when multitasking, but it’s also the part of digital products in multiple industries that facilitate the users’ routine significantly.
Contents:
- Where and why used
- Pros & cons of speech recognition
- How we add speech recognition to your product
- Wrap up
Where & why used
Having spoken to many entrepreneurs & startups with various products and experiences, I understood that speech recognition tech could be a good addition for an app in many spheres or even a killing feature your digital product is based on.
If you are asking yourself: “What can I enhance to make my product even more usable and increase customer retention”, you may have a look at the direction of various speech recognition applications in different industries.
Education
👨‍🏫 Foreign language learning
A speech recognition feature can become an essential part of the language learning application making it easier for learners to control & enhance their pronunciation in a safe environment. It could be set up to fit the individual learner’s needs, decreasing the performance anxiety and allowing one to master self-control skills.
Besides, speech recognition could also be not only an additional tool for language learning, but the feature your product is based on: an inspiring example of a natural way of learning English is Papua. This app takes a user on a New York adventure starting from coming to the city and finding a job. As you’re following the game plot, you should speak (record your voice) to “real” people (powered by AI) in life-like situations. The game captures your personal mistakes to pay particular attention to them further and helps you understand your English’s strong and weak sides to polish them. A fantastic idea!
👦 Students with learning disabilities (LD)
Speech recognition technology helps deal with the writing mechanics difficulties, reducing the fear of making a mistake, and inspires students for a more deliberate writing process.
So, integrating the feature into a learning management system or a learning app would give students with special needs equal access to educational technology, making them feel included, encouraged, and unlocking their full potential.
Online conferencing
✍️ Meetings transcription
As online conferencing is now an essential part of our lives, it’s great to have an opportunity to automate the process of taking notes during a call. It’s possible with a voice-to-text converter based on the speech recognition feature that will automatically transcribe your meeting to a google document.
The voice-to-text converter could be added to your online conferencing system to make the routine of your users easier. For example, the Jellyfish.tech team build an online tutoring marketplace (a platform to connect learners and experts), where one of the killer features is an automated voice-to-text transcription during the calls with experts. Thanks to this functionality, learners could easily get their notes done for later use.
Customer service
👩‍💻 Call recordings analysis
Another sphere of application of speech recognition is analysis and enhancement of customer service, particularly if the lion’s share of it is given by phone.
The speech recognition feature helps analyze the recorded conversation of a support team representative and a customer and find exactly what you need without going through the calls manually. We could also add search & filters to make it even easier to analyze the recordings and get the filtered results in a few clicks.
Healthcare
👩‍⚕️ Hands-free clinical records producing
The speech recognition feature is used in healthcare mostly for producing reports and patients’ notes hands-free. This boosts doctors’ productivity allowing them to focus on their patients instead of typing the documentation.
Besides, having the feature of automated notes writing improves the accuracy of the medical recordings: the system catches everything the patient and doctor say from the first to the last word.
Creative writing
đź“„ Hands-free ideas capturing & content creation
The benefits of a speech recognition feature that writes down your notes as it is shouldn’t be explained. Every person who did their writing at least once in life knows that typing often goes behind the thought and how easily good ideas slip out of mind.
The speech recognition helper would be an excellent tool for a content creator to make a draft hands-free, taking down the ideas and their descriptions quickly & without hassle.
Youtubers, podcast owners, or interviewers could use the speech recognition feature for making the subtitles/transcribing the voice records into a text for further use.
For people with special needs
🤝 E-inclusion
Speech recognition opens a lot of opportunities for people with special needs: it removes a physical barrier to accessing the technologies, decreases anxiety, and helps them be more independent during the learning process.
Those who can’t use the keyboard and mouse because of physical injuries could be provided with a hands-free laptop/phone operation, getting improved access to digital technologies.
Those with cognitive and learning disabilities could use voice instead of typing for producing the academic papers and assignments stress-free and improving learning productivity.
Besides, this would also work well for people with temporary injuries (i.e. a broken hand).
Pros & cons of speech recognition
Advantages:
- Time savings. It’s much faster to have your speech recognized and turned into the text than typing. Speaking your thoughts out loud instead of putting them down yourself helps you stay focused and increase brainstorming efficiency, as well as speed up the navigation via a laptop, phone, or any search engine you use.
- Convenience. Multitasking is made easy with an in-built speech recognition tool: it may execute your commands while you’re driving a car, write down your ideas on the go, form the medical report during patient examination, or just allow you to deep clean your house while making notes for your next article.
- Access to up-to-date digital technologies and the Internet to people with special needs. This is probably the most awesome feature the development of speech recognition technology made possible. The websites, software, digital products, phones, & laptops can now be adapted for users with special needs.
- Increased learning efficiency. The technology also contributes to enhancing the quality of learning, including dealing with learning disabilities (i.e. dysgraphia) and correcting a language learner’s pronunciation.
Disadvantages:
- Limited vocabulary. When talking about a specific industry with its own terms or jargon, it may require time & resources to “educate” your speech recognition tool to detect them. Here, you can either do it yourself as a product owner or involve your users in enhancing the software’s vocabulary.
- Lack of accuracy. To help the tool do its job well, users should create conditions close to the ideal ones: a quiet place without ambient noises, clear and rather loud speech. In addition, every speech recognition tool has its own rate of accuracy (i.e. getting 46 words out of 50 correctly) that you should also take into account.
- A person’s speech with peculiarities is often not captured. The truth is we all have our own speech peculiarities starting from pronunciation to intonation. Besides, don’t forget about a number of dialects that exist on the territory of any country, which we often don’t even notice. All these factors could complicate the process of speech recognition, making the users pronounce the words loudly & distinctly.
How we add speech recognition to your product
My team and I see no point in building the whole speech recognition system from scratch, reinventing the wheel. That’s why we work with a speech recognition feature based on the Speech-to-text API from Google Cloud, which has proven its efficiency in a few projects we’ve done and requires less resource to be implemented. We could integrate this functionality into your app and make all the adjustments you need and/or build up the required features so that it will totally comply with end-user needs.
Our starter development kit (SDK) covers this integration, it takes us up to one week to connect a third-party Google voice recognition API to your app and set it up to work properly.
Wrap up
Witnessing impressive growth, the speech recognition technology market is expected to reach $22.0 billion by 2026, according to MarketsandMarkets. No wonder the tech is developing so fast, as it’s a convenient way of interaction between a customer and a product interface that helps them complete their routine tasks easier and improve the user experience. So if you’re considering adopting speech recognition technology for your product or application, it’s just the right time to learn more about it!
Learn if it’s worth adding a speech recognition feature to your product:
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