Intermediate · Generative AI

Speech-to-Text

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Automatic transcription of spoken audio into written text.

Technical Definition

Automatic transcription of spoken audio into written text.

How it works

Also called automatic speech recognition (ASR). Models like Whisper, Deepgram, and Google ASR use Transformer encoders trained on huge multilingual audio datasets. They handle noise, accents, and code-switching with increasingly human-level accuracy, enabling captions, voice assistants, and meeting transcription.

Related Concepts

• Transformer — An architecture that uses self-attention to process sequences in parallel, powering modern language models like GPT and BERT.
• Multi-Modal AI — AI systems that process and reason across multiple data types — text, images, audio, video — in a unified model.
• Text-to-Speech — A model that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio.