Speech AI

Speech AI is the branch of artificial intelligence that turns spoken language into actionable data and lifelike audio, combining automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural-language understanding (NLU), and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. An end-to-end pipeline captures a waveform, converts it to a Mel spectrogram, feeds it through a Transformer ASR model such as Whisper or Conformer to produce text, parses intent with an LLM, decides a response in a dialogue manager, and renders the reply via a neural vocoder like HiFi-GAN. Advanced systems offer real-time streaming at sub-300 ms latency, word-level timestamps, zero-shot voice cloning, and multilingual support. Key metrics include word-error rate, mean-opinion score, and real-time factor. Deployed in call-center bots, smart speakers, automotive assistants, and accessibility tools, Speech AI unlocks voice commerce, hands-free control, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation chat that can “listen and talk back.” Challenges—accent diversity, background noise, and deepfake risk—are tackled with domain fine-tuning, noise-robust training, and watermarking.