List of speech recognition software

Speech recognition software is available for many computing platforms, operating systems, use models, and software licenses. Here is a listing of such, grouped in various useful ways.

## Acoustic models and speech corpus (compilation)

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The following list presents notable speech recognition software engines with a brief synopsis of characteristics.

Application name | Description | Open-source | License | Operating system | Programming language | Supported language, note | Offline or online

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CMU Sphinx | HMM | Yes | BSD style | Cross-platform | Java | English, German, French, Mandarin, Russian | Offline
HTK | HMM neural net | No | HTK specific | Cross-platform | C | English; version 3.5 released December 2015 |
Julius | HMM trigrams | Yes | BSD style, non-commercial | Cross-platform | C | Japanese, English; [2] | Offline
Kaldi | Neural net | Yes | Apache | Cross-platform | C++ | English |
RWTH ASR | RWTH Aachen University | No | RWTH ASR, non-commercial use only | Linux, macOS | C++ | English |
Whisper | Encoder/decoder transformer | Yes | MIT license | Cross-platform | Python (programming language) | Multilingual | Online (through API) and Offline

## Macintosh

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Application name | Description | Open-source | License | Price | Note

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Dragon for Mac (discontinued 2018) | macOS; by Nuance | No | Proprietary |  |
Dragon Dictate (discontinued) | macOS; by Nuance | No | Proprietary |  |
MacSpeech Scribe (discontinued) | Transcription from recorded text; acquired by Nuance |  |  |  |
iListen (discontinued) | PowerPC Macintosh; discontinued by MacSpeech; acquired by Nuance |  |  |  |
Speakable items | Included with macOS |  |  |  |
ViaVoice (discontinued) | IBM Product; acquired by Nuance |  |  |  |
Voice Navigator | Original GUI voice control; 1989 |  |  |  |

## Cross-platform web apps based on Chrome

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The following list presents notable speech recognition software that operate in a Chrome browser as web apps. They make use of HTML5 Web-Speech-API.[1]

Application name | Description | Open-source | License | Price | Note

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Speechmatics[2] | Cloud based and on-premise automatic speech recognition | No | Proprietary | From £0.06 per minute of audio |

## Mobile devices and smartphones

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Many mobile phone handsets, including feature phones and smartphones such as iPhones and BlackBerrys, have basic dial-by-voice features built in. Many third-party apps have implemented natural-language speech recognition support, including:

Application name | Description | Open-source | License | Price | Note

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Assistant.ai | Assistant for Android, iOS and Windows Phone | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free | Discontinued
Dragon Dictation |  | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free |
Google Now | Android voice search | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free |
Google Voice Search |  | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free |
Microsoft Cortana | Microsoft voice search | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free |
Siri Personal Assistant | Apple's virtual personal assistant | No | Proprietary, freeware | Free |
Alexa – Amazon Echo | Amazon's personal assistant | No | Proprietary |  |
SILVIA | Android and iOS | No |  |  |
Vlingo |  |  |  |  |

## Windows

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### Windows built-in speech recognition

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The Windows Speech Recognition version 8.0 by Microsoft comes built into Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. Speech Recognition is available only in English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese and only in the corresponding version of Windows; meaning you cannot use the speech recognition engine in one language if you use a version of Windows in another language. Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 8 Pro allow you to change the system language, and therefore change which speech engine is available. Windows Speech Recognition evolved into Cortana (software), a personal assistant included in Windows 10.

### Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 third-party speech recognition

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* Braina – Dictate into third party software and websites,[3] fill web forms and execute vocal commands.[4]
* Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications – Successor to the older DragonDictate product. Focus on dictation. 64-bit Windows support since version 10.1.
* Tazti – Create speech command profiles to play PC games and control applications – programs. Create speech commands to open files, folders, webpages, applications. Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions.[5]
* Voice Finger – software that improves the Windows speech recognition system by adding several extensions to it. The software enables controlling the mouse and the keyboard by only using the voice. It is especially useful for aiding users to overcome disabilities or to heal from computer injuries.

### Microsoft Speech API

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The first version of the Microsoft Speech API was released for Windows NT 3.51 and Windows 95 in 1995, it was then part of Windows up to Windows Vista. This initial version already contained Direct Speech Recognition and Direct Text To Speech APIs which applications could use to directly control engines, as well as simplified 'higher-level' Voice Command and Voice Talk APIs. Speech recognition functionality included as part of Microsoft Office and on Tablet PCs running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. It can also be downloaded as part of the Speech SDK 5.1 for Windows applications, but since that is aimed at developers building speech applications, the pure SDK form lacks any user interface (numerous applications were available), and thus is unsuitable for end users.

## Built-in software

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* Microsoft Kinect includes built-in software which allows speech recognition of commands.
* Older generations of Nokia phones like Nokia N Series (before using Windows 7 mobile technology) used speech-recognition with family names from contact list and a few commands.
* Siri, originally implemented in the iPhone 4S, Apple's personal assistant for iOS, which uses technology from Nuance Communications.
* Cortana (software), Microsoft's personal assistant built into Windows Phone and Windows 10.

## Interactive voice response

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The following are interactive voice response (IVR) systems:

* CSLU Toolkit
* Genesys[6]
* HTK – copyrighted by Microsoft, but allows altering software for licensee's internal use
* LumenVox ASR
* Tellme Networks; acquired by Microsoft

## Unix-like x86 and x86-64 speech transcription software

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* Janus Recognition Toolkit (JRTk)[7][8]
* Mozilla DeepSpeech is developing an open-source Speech-To-Text engine based on Baidu's deep speech research paper.[9]

## Discontinued software

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* IBM VoiceType (formerly IBM Personal Dictation System)
* IBM ViaVoice – Embedded version still maintained by IBM.[10] No longer supported for versions above Windows Vista.[11] Untested above macOS 10.4 or on Macintoshes with an Intel chipset.[12]
* Quack.com; acquired by AOL; the name has now been reused for an iPad search app.
* SpeechWorks from Nuance Communications.
* Yap Speech Cloud – Speech-to-text platform acquired by Amazon.com.

## See also

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* Speech recognition software for Linux – Linux software for speech recognition
* Transcription software – Software that assists in the conversion of human speech into a text transcript

## References

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1. ^ "Web Speech API Specification". dvcs.w3.org. Archived from the original on 2016-06-21.
2. ^ Orlowski, Andrew. "Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough". The Register. Situation Publishing. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
3. ^ "Speech Recognition Software for Windows PC – Braina". www.brainasoft.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-07.
4. ^ "Dynamic Faceting-List of Most 57 Speech Recognition SWs and Web Services". Archived from the original on February 13, 2019. Retrieved February 23, 2019.
5. ^ O'Neill, Mark (2013-11-06). "Control your PC with these 5 speech recognition programs". PC World. Archived from the original on 2014-01-01. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
6. ^ "Interactive Voice Response". Genesys. Archived from the original on 2016-10-14.
7. ^ [1][dead link]
8. ^ Lavie, A.; Waibel, A.; Levin, L.; Finke, M.; Gates, D.; Gavalda, M.; Zeppenfeld, T.; Zhan, Puming (1 April 1997). "Janus-III: speech-to-speech translation in multiple languages". 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Vol. 1\. IEEE Xplore. pp. 99–102\. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.36.6967. doi:10.1109/ICASSP.1997.599557. ISBN 978-0-8186-7919-3. S2CID 1514209.
9. ^ "A TensorFlow implementation of Baidu's DeepSpeech architecture". Mozilla. 2017-12-05. Retrieved 2017-12-05.
10. ^ "IBM - Embedded ViaVoice - Embedded ViaVoice - Software". Archived from the original on 2010-08-08. Retrieved 2010-06-29.
11. ^ "Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows 7". Nuance Communications, Customer Help. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
12. ^ "ViaVoice for Mac OS X on Intel Chipset". Nuance Communications, Customer Help. Retrieved 2019-03-16.