List of speech recognition software

Speech recognition software is available for many computing platforms, operating systems, use models, and software licenses. Here is a listing of such, grouped in various useful ways.

Acoustic models and speech corpus (compilation)

The following list presents notable speech recognition software engines with a brief synopsis of characteristics.

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Operating system	Programming language	Supported language, note	Offline or online
CMU Sphinx	HMM	Yes	BSD style	Cross-platform	Java	English, German, French, Mandarin, Russian	Offline
HTK	HMM neural net	No	HTK specific	Cross-platform	C	English; version 3.5 released December 2015
Julius	HMM trigrams	Yes	BSD style, non-commercial	Cross-platform	C	Japanese, English; [2]	Offline
Kaldi	Neural net	Yes	Apache	Cross-platform	C++	English
RWTH ASR	RWTH Aachen University	No	RWTH ASR, non-commercial use only	Linux, macOS	C++	English
Whisper	Encoder/decoder transformer	Yes	MIT license	Cross-platform	Python (programming language)	Multilingual	Online (through API) and Offline

Macintosh

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Price	Note
Dragon for Mac (discontinued 2018)	macOS; by Nuance	No	Proprietary
Dragon Dictate (discontinued)	macOS; by Nuance	No	Proprietary
MacSpeech Scribe (discontinued)	Transcription from recorded text; acquired by Nuance
iListen (discontinued)	PowerPC Macintosh; discontinued by MacSpeech; acquired by Nuance
Speakable items	Included with macOS
ViaVoice (discontinued)	IBM Product; acquired by Nuance
Voice Navigator	Original GUI voice control; 1989

Cross-platform web apps based on Chrome

The following list presents notable speech recognition software that operate in a Chrome browser as web apps. They make use of HTML5 Web-Speech-API.^[1]

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Price	Note
Speechmatics[2]	Cloud based and on-premise automatic speech recognition	No	Proprietary	From £0.06 per minute of audio

Mobile devices and smartphones

Many mobile phone handsets, including feature phones and smartphones such as iPhones and BlackBerrys, have basic dial-by-voice features built in. Many third-party apps have implemented natural-language speech recognition support, including:

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Price	Note
Assistant.ai	Assistant for Android, iOS and Windows Phone	No	Proprietary, freeware	Free	Discontinued
Dragon Dictation		No	Proprietary, freeware	Free
Google Now	Android voice search	No	Proprietary, freeware	Free
Google Voice Search		No	Proprietary, freeware	Free
Microsoft Cortana	Microsoft voice search	No	Proprietary, freeware	Free
Siri Personal Assistant	Apple's virtual personal assistant	No	Proprietary, freeware	Free
Alexa – Amazon Echo	Amazon's personal assistant	No	Proprietary
SILVIA	Android and iOS	No
Vlingo

Windows

Windows built-in speech recognition

The Windows Speech Recognition version 8.0 by Microsoft comes built into Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. Speech Recognition is available only in English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese and only in the corresponding version of Windows; meaning you cannot use the speech recognition engine in one language if you use a version of Windows in another language. Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 8 Pro allow you to change the system language, and therefore change which speech engine is available. Windows Speech Recognition evolved into Cortana (software), a personal assistant included in Windows 10.

Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 third-party speech recognition

• Braina – Dictate into third party software and websites,^[3] fill web forms and execute vocal commands.^[4]
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications – Successor to the older DragonDictate product. Focus on dictation. 64-bit Windows support since version 10.1.
• Tazti – Create speech command profiles to play PC games and control applications – programs. Create speech commands to open files, folders, webpages, applications. Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions.^[5]
• Voice Finger – software that improves the Windows speech recognition system by adding several extensions to it. The software enables controlling the mouse and the keyboard by only using the voice. It is especially useful for aiding users to overcome disabilities or to heal from computer injuries.

Windows XP or 2000 only

• Microsoft Speech API – Speech recognition functionality included as part of Microsoft Office and on Tablet PCs running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. It can also be downloaded as part of the Speech SDK 5.1 for Windows applications, but since that is aimed at developers building speech applications, the pure SDK form lacks any user interface, and thus is unsuitable for end users.

Built-in software

• Microsoft Kinect includes built-in software which allows speech recognition of commands.
• Older generations of Nokia phones like Nokia N Series (before using Windows 7 mobile technology) used speech-recognition with family names from contact list and a few commands.
• Siri, originally implemented in the iPhone 4S, Apple's personal assistant for iOS, which uses technology from Nuance Communications.
• Cortana (software), Microsoft's personal assistant built into Windows Phone and Windows 10.

Interactive voice response

The following are interactive voice response (IVR) systems:

• CSLU Toolkit
• Genesys^[6]
• HTK – copyrighted by Microsoft, but allows altering software for licensee's internal use
• LumenVox ASR
• Tellme Networks; acquired by Microsoft

Unix-like x86 and x86-64 speech transcription software

• Janus Recognition Toolkit (JRTk)^[7][8]
• Mozilla DeepSpeech is developing an open-source Speech-To-Text engine based on Baidu's deep speech research paper.^[9]

Discontinued software

• IBM VoiceType (formerly IBM Personal Dictation System)
• IBM ViaVoice – Embedded version still maintained by IBM.^[10] No longer supported for versions above Windows Vista.^[11] Untested above macOS 10.4 or on Macintoshes with an Intel chipset.^[12]
• Quack.com; acquired by AOL; the name has now been reused for an iPad search app.
• SpeechWorks from Nuance Communications.
• Yap Speech Cloud – Speech-to-text platform acquired by Amazon.com.

See also

• Speech recognition software for Linux – Linux software for speech recognition
• Transcription software – Software that assists in the conversion of human speech into a text transcript

References

1. "Web Speech API Specification". dvcs.w3.org. Archived from the original on 2016-06-21.
2. Orlowski, Andrew. "Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough". The Register. Situation Publishing. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
3. "Speech Recognition Software for Windows PC – Braina". www.brainasoft.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-07.
4. "Dynamic Faceting-List of Most 57 Speech Recognition SWs and Web Services". Archived from the original on February 13, 2019. Retrieved February 23, 2019.
5. O'Neill, Mark (2013-11-06). "Control your PC with these 5 speech recognition programs". PC World. Archived from the original on 2014-01-01. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
6. "Interactive Voice Response". Genesys. Archived from the original on 2016-10-14.
7. [1]^{[dead link]}
8. Lavie, A.; Waibel, A.; Levin, L.; Finke, M.; Gates, D.; Gavalda, M.; Zeppenfeld, T.; Zhan, Puming (1 April 1997). "Janus-III: speech-to-speech translation in multiple languages". 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Vol. 1. IEEE Xplore. pp. 99–102. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.36.6967. doi:10.1109/ICASSP.1997.599557. ISBN 978-0-8186-7919-3. S2CID 1514209.
9. "A TensorFlow implementation of Baidu's DeepSpeech architecture". Mozilla. 2017-12-05. Retrieved 2017-12-05.
10. "IBM - Embedded ViaVoice - Embedded ViaVoice - Software". Archived from the original on 2010-08-08. Retrieved 2010-06-29.
11. "Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows 7". Nuance Communications, Customer Help. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
12. "ViaVoice for Mac OS X on Intel Chipset". Nuance Communications, Customer Help. Retrieved 2019-03-16.