Speech AI

PG()
Bartosz Roguski
Machine Learning Engineer
July 3, 2025
Glossary Category

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.