Perform Speech Recognition in Your Javascript Applications

An introduction to Web speech recognition APIs

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Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics. It recognizes and translates spoken language into text. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition, or speech to text (STT).

Machine learning (ML) is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning has provided the majority of speech recognition breakthroughs in this century. Today, speech recognition technology is everywhere, such as Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Nest.

Speech recognition, along with voice response — also known as speech synthesis, or text to speech (TTS) — is powered by Web speech APIs.

In this article, we focus on speech recognition in JavaScript applications. Speech synthesis is described in another article.

SpeechRecognition Interface

SpeechRecognition is the controller interface for the recognition service. It is called webkitSpeechRecognition in Chrome. SpeechRecognition handles the SpeechRecognitionEvent sent from…