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Plain-language AI glossary

Term 43ApplicationsMeaning / context / connections

Applications / Definition

Speech-to-Text (STT)

AI technology that converts spoken audio into written text, enabling voice input, transcription, and voice-controlled interfaces.

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MeaningThe one-sentence definition.

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ContextHow the idea works in practice.

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01 / Plain-language context

How Speech-to-Text (STT) works.

Speech-to-text (also called automatic speech recognition or ASR) converts audio into text. OpenAI's Whisper model is the industry standard: it supports 90+ languages, handles accents and background noise well, and is available as both an API and an open-source model you can self-host. Deepgram and AssemblyAI offer specialized STT with features like speaker diarization (identifying who said what) and real-time streaming transcription.

For mobile apps, Apple's Speech framework and Android's SpeechRecognizer provide on-device STT with no API costs and no internet requirement. These are ideal for simple voice input but less accurate than cloud models for complex or multilingual audio.

In production, STT is commonly paired with an LLM and TTS to create voice assistants: speech goes in (STT), gets processed by the AI (LLM), and the response is spoken aloud (TTS). Key considerations: real-time vs. batch transcription, language support, handling of domain-specific terminology, and whether on-device or cloud processing better fits your privacy and latency requirements.

02 / Practical uses

Where it helps.

  1. 01Voice input for AI assistants
  2. 02Meeting transcription
  3. 03Podcast and video captioning
  4. 04Voice search
  5. 05Dictation and note-taking
03 / Keep exploring
Text-to-Speech (TTS)AI technology that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio, enabling voice interfaces and audio content generation.Multimodal AIAI models that can process and generate multiple types of data: text, images, audio, video, and code.Edge AI / On-Device AIRunning AI models directly on user devices (phones, laptops, IoT) rather than sending data to cloud servers for processing.Natural Language Processing (NLP)The branch of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in useful ways.