Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech
What is Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech?
Speech-to-text (automatic speech recognition, ASR) converts spoken words into text; text-to-speech (TTS) turns text into natural-sounding speech. Together they let AI work on voice calls.
Speech-to-text is what makes voice interactions usable by AI: once a call is transcribed, in real time or afterward, it can be searched, summarized, analyzed for sentiment and intent, and used to prompt the agent with relevant knowledge while the customer is still talking. Text-to-speech gives voicebots and IVR systems their voice, and modern neural voices are far more natural than older recorded prompts.
Accuracy depends on audio quality, accents, background noise and industry vocabulary, so contact centers test recognition on their own calls before relying on it. Because recordings and transcripts contain personal data, how they are stored, redacted and retained is as important as how accurate they are.
Related: Conversational AI, Customer sentiment, Conversational data.