I’m pretty sure all of us have encountered a speech recognition system in our lives. Speech recognition is used in smartphones, automated customer service, and many other high-end gadgets. It’s being increasingly integrated in many devices to provide a better hands-free user experience. Apple came up with Siri for iPhone and most of the Android phones have speech recognition enabled in some form or the other. But how does it actually happen? Most people are annoyed by the quality of the speech recognition systems, and I don’t blame them for it. This happens mostly because they have surprisingly little knowledge about how their words are actually understood by the machines. I have worked on speech recognition in the past and so I just wanted to take a stab at it to explain what happens under the hood.   Continue reading “I Came. I Heard. I Understood.” →