What Is Voice Recognition?

Voice recognition is the process of using AI to identify a specific user’s voice. Modern speech-based technologies can be controlled by user voice, but voice recognition goes beyond that. It identifies and authenticates a person’s voice and distinguishes between multiple user identities based on their distinct voiceprint. Voice recognition technologies have several applications in health care, finance, and other fields that require highly secure systems controlled by human speech.

Several different businesses can use voice recognition in their operations.

Voice-based medical assistance

The medical field has numerous use cases for voice recognition, helping both patients and doctors. Medical institutions can use a voice recognition program that listens to calling patients, asks them to confirm their symptoms, and then gives sample medical advice. If the symptoms match a more serious condition, it can forward them to a telemedicine appointment. Voice recognition also allows patients to confirm their identities with their voice and access their medical records.

Automating financial transactions

Financial institutions are starting to use voice recognition software to verify customers’ identities. The software can ask customers to verify parts of their account details to authenticate the speaker before redirecting them to customer service.

Alternatively, some voice recognition platforms allow customers to pay their bills via voice chat. The software verifies a user’s identity by asking a series of questions with specific responses. Once authenticated, users can access their accounts and use voice commands to state the payments they want to make. The voice recognition platform then communicates with the user’s bank accounts to organize payment.

Automatic customer service platforms free up customer service agents and reduce operational costs.

Flight control in aviation

Pilots access information or make minor adjustments via voice control when engaging with flight systems. Voice recognition software understands a pilot’s specific commands and implements flight adjustments as necessary. By relying on voice recognition software, pilots can reduce their workloads while enhancing safety.

Configuring voice recognition applications to recognize only the pilot’s and co-pilot’s voice biometrics ensures no interference during the flight. The software initiates voice commands only if there is a direct match.

Voice recognition works as follows.

Audio capture

Voice recognition begins with audio capture. The software listens to spoken language and captures it as a recording. It then processes and normalizes the audio, removing background noise and ensuring the volume is regular across the recording.

Voiceprint analysis

Voiceprint refers to voice biometrics, such as tone, accent, pitch, or frequency changes. These are the unique characteristics that make up an individual’s voice. After audio capture, voice recognition technology analyzes the voiceprint to understand how the person speaks. It stores the voiceprint information in a database of known voice recordings.

Voice authentication

When a user speaks to the system, the technology records the audio, decomposes it into individual sounds, and then compares it against the stored data. AI models use deep learning and natural language processing to compare individual phonetic sounds, pitches, and tones.

The voice recognition platform verifies identity if the user’s voice biometrics match the record. Voice recognition accuracy improves if the platform has multiple samples of a person’s voice. Some speaker recognition platforms allow the user to say a specific sentence that has been pre-recorded, helping to improve recognition accuracy further.

There are two different types of voice recognition systems, both of which aim to authenticate the speaker’s identity.

Text-dependent

Text-dependent voice recognition systems require the user to speak a pre-determined phrase as a passcode for authentication or recognition. The user configures the phrase when they register with the system. For example, ‘This is [Name].’

The voice recognition software compares the user’s unique voiceprint against the pre-recorded data. The software authenticates the person’s identity if the pitch, tone, accent, and frequency match.

Text-dependent systems are cost-effective to integrate, making them suitable for banking and medical institutions.

Text independent

Text-independent voice recognition systems are more sophisticated and do not require special password phrases. The user simply speaks, and the platform records and analyzes unique vocal characteristics like pitch, tone, and speaking style in the background, independent of spoken words.

As a more flexible, continuous speech recognition system, text-independent listening is more expensive and complicated to implement.

Speech recognition is a broader field that involves every form of voice recognition, including speech-to-text, virtual assistants, and other use cases that do not require identity verification. Voice recognition is a specific type of speech recognition that focuses on identifying and authenticating a person’s voice. Speech recognition only uses voice recognition technology if it needs to authenticate a user before allowing them access to its functions.

Speech recognition use cases beyond voice recognition

All voice recognition is speech recognition, but all speech recognition is not voice recognition. There are a range of additional use cases that speech recognition technology offers that do not use voice recognition.

Transcription

Speech recognition technology listens to a recording and then uses a corpus of previous examples of spoken words to accurately transcribe the recording. Transcription speech processing is sometimes combined with other technologies, like language modeling, to provide details about the voice recording. For example, organizations can monitor sentiment and intent in customer communication.

Subtitling videos

Automatic speech recognition tools can generate subtitle captions, helping to increase accessibility to these video sources. This allows you to reach a wider audience and repurpose content for multilingual audiences much faster.

Toxicity detection

By monitoring a user’s pitch, tone, and vocabulary, speech recognition platforms identify when someone uses violent language or hate speech. They detect toxicity categories, like profanity, graphic language, or harassment, and can help with automatic moderation.

Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed speech recognition service that uses artificial intelligence to transcribe quickly and accurately. It is powered by a next-generation, multi-billion parameter speech foundation model that delivers high-accuracy transcriptions for streaming and recorded speech. For example, Amazon Transcribe can:

• Process live and recorded audio or video input to provide high-quality transcriptions for search and analysis.
• Handle a wide range of speech and acoustic characteristics, including volume, pitch, and speaking rate variations.
• Mask or remove sensitive or unsuitable words for your audience from transcription results.
• Provide up to 10 alternative transcriptions for each sentence to help you quickly choose the best option for your content and domain.

Get started with speech and voice recognition on AWS by creating a free AWS account today.