Background

Facilitating text input into computers and handheld devices is a work in progress. Well-known solutions include mobile triple-tapping, ambiguous/unambiguous text prediction, mini-qwerty keyboards, on-screen soft-key displays, and handwriting/gesture recognition. In theory, speech-to-text would be a natural alternative: if one could simply speak into their computer or device and have the text magically appear on the screen.

Unfortunately, speech-to-text has been historically plagued with problems, including infinite language perplexity, background and channel noises, varied pronunciations, unacceptable speaker-training methods, and lack of intuitive error-correction. As a result, speech-to-text continues to be a futuristic technology; except for specialized applications wherein the lexicon is fairly compressed as in call-center automation.