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Top 9 Speech-to-Text Applications of 2023

An In-Depth Look at Popular and Effective Speech-to-Text Services

OneAI
OneAI
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Nov 15, 2022
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3 min read

According to a 2020 survey, 63% of respondents say that speech-to-text services are a critical part of their current workflow.

In 2020, the Speech-to-Text market was valued at 10 billion USD; in 2022 it’s projected to be valued at approximately 17.17 billion USD. As organizations and individuals continue to produce more content and utilize STT applications, the market grows significantly every year, expected to reach USD 53 billion by 2030. 

As voice technology continues to surpass expectations, developers are trying to get past intrusions such as background noise, punctuation, accents, fluency, technical words, and more.

 More on the growing competition in 2023 on Business Growth Report.

What is Speech-to-Text?

Speech-to-text or Speech Recognition software is an application programming interface (API) that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text through computational linguistics. An STT service will take a provided audio file and process it through a combination of machine learning and AI to detect patterns in sound waves for accurate transcription.  

Some Features of Speech-to-Text APIs are:

  • Multi-language support
  • Paragraph detection
  • Speaker labels
  • Custom Vocabulary
  • Topic Detection
  • Automatic Punctuation
  • Profanity filter or redaction
  • Accurate Transcription
  • Real-Time Streaming
  • Keyword Boosting
  • Tailored Models 

How Do We Use Speech-to-Text?

  • Smart Assistants: Siri and Alexa are probably the most frequently used case for speech-to-text. They take in spoken commands, convert them into text, and carry out actions requested by the user.
  • Sales and Support: Like Smart Assistant, these digital assistants can provide tips, hints, and solutions to agents by transcribing and analyzing information in real time. Some STT sites offer Emotion and Sentiment Detections which can help businesses gauge sales pitches and calls with customers.
  • Interactive Agents: Voice bots hear humans speak and give automatic responses. Converting Speech to Text is the first step that has to happen quickly for the interactions to feel like a real conversation.
  • Technical Support: Contact centers can utilize STT to create transcripts of their calls and provide more ways to evaluate agents, customers, and insights into different aspects of business that are typically hard to access. 
  • Accessibility: Providing transcriptions of spoken speech can tremendously help with accessibility for those who are hard of hearing or simply need transcriptions to understand. Whether it’s providing captions for lectures or creating technology that transcribes speech instantaneously. 
  • Speech Analytics: Speech Analytics attempts to process spoken audio to extract insights. This can be utilized in meetings, speeches, and many other environments. 

Top 9 Speech Recognition Software

*prices are were calculated on November 11th, 2022, and are subject to change 

1. Google Cloud Speech-to-Text: Google’s STT product was initially built for their Google Home voice assistant, thus their initiative is more focused on short command-and-response applications. They have pretty low accuracy and slow speed with only a 2.5x real-time speed up on transcriptions. There is also very little option for customization, only allowing keyword boosting. Google Cloud offers an easy-to-use user interface to experiment with speech, audio and try various configurations to get both accuracy and quality.

- Price: $1.44 audio/hour for standard models

2. AWS: Amazon Transcribe is a customer-oriented product taking flight after the development of the Alexa Voice Assistant. This software is good for short audio because of its command-and-response transcription initiative much like Google Cloud. The accuracy is on the higher end for consumer audio data but not on the same level for business audio, meaning meetings and business analytics. Their speed is on the lower end with only 4X speed up on batch transcriptions and limited customizations. 

- Price: $1.44 audio/hour for general models

3. AssemblyAI: AssemblyAI’s main advantage is the high accuracy in use cases that do not have a lot of terminology, jargon, or accents. Like AWS, their speed is 4X real-time and slow. They have very limited customization so it doesn’t work well for terminology it’s never been exposed to or novel accents. This software also allows for robust applications such as entity detection, PII redaction, sentiment analysis, and more. 

- Price: $0.90 audio/hour

4. IBM Watson: IBM Watson offers AI-powered Speech to Text transcription and speech recognition solutions. It enables fast speech recognition and trainable software to deploy text-based solutions in preferred languages and audio characteristics. This solution also allows for acoustic and language training options. 

-Price: $1.20 audio/hour

5. Rev.ai: Rev.ai’s STT APIs allow businesses to build powerful downstream applications. They train their speech engine on 50,000+ hours of human-transcribed content from a wide range of languages, topics, and industries. Rev.ai covers almost all major English languages across the globe and provides quality results out of context regardless of who is speaking. Rev.ai offers 90% accuracy and fully punctuated transcriptions.  

-Price: $1.50 audio/minute

6. Amberscript: Amberscript is building solutions that allow users to automatically transform audio and video into text and subtitles using speech recognition. Using their users' data, they can create powerful speech recognition engines in European languages. Amberscript combines artificial and human intelligence to bring translated captions and fast transcriptions.

-Price: $10.28 audio/hour

7. Soniox: With 95% accuracy and unmatched Latency, Soniox has easily claimed its spot on the list. The application has found a way to get past challenges such as background noise, crosstalk, interruption, accents, audio quality, and much more. The application can instantly recognize spoken words and provide an incredible caption rendering experience regardless of filler words while performing robustly across live streams, telephone, and audio/video files.

-Price: $0.18-$1.10 audio/hour

8. Whisper AI: Whisper is an automatic speech recognition system trained on 680,000 hours of multi-language data collected. The software allows the system to bypass robustness to accents, background noise, and technical language. Whisper AI uses sophisticated AI algorithms and powerful processors to optimize sound and process audio in 30-second chunks. Whisper AI allows developers and users to choose to run it on the computation platform of their choice- making it both easy to use and accessible.

9. One AI: We might be slightly biased, but with a 94.21% average accuracy for Videos, News, and Phone calls- One AI allows users to transcribe audio and take it to the next step with Speech Analytics and Audio Intelligence. From AI Summarization to Sentiment Detection to Topic Split and more, One AI offers the highest tailored, out-of-the-box model accuracy powered by Soniox and Whisper AI. One AI offers an easy-to-use user interface program that allows you to experiment in the Studio with different configurations. One AI provides highly accurate and context-aware transcriptions with minimal lag and the use of natural languages.  

-Price: $0.50-$1.00 audio/hour- check out our Pricing Page to see other plans

Conclusion:

Utilizing the best STT applications that the web has to offer can help create better business practices and efficiency all while saving time. With AI's impressive abilities, businesses and individuals can use Speech-to-Text APIs for dictation, chatbots, translation, transcription, and much more.

Check out the One AI Language Studio and create variations with the free demo version to see if it’s a good fit. Contact us or visit our Pricing Page for more information.