What is speech-to-text?

Phone audio is harder than a quiet dictation setting — it's compressed, often noisy, and callers interrupt themselves. Modern engines handle typical calls well, but accuracy drops with heavy background noise, crosstalk, and unfamiliar names or jargon. Systems built for telephony, and ones that can learn your industry's vocabulary, close much of that gap. There is no single accuracy number; it depends on the audio.

Speech-to-text figures out what was said, producing a transcript. Voice recognition — more precisely, speaker recognition — figures out who is speaking, often for authentication. The terms get mixed up because both listen to speech, but they answer different questions. A phone AI system relies on speech-to-text; speaker identification is a separate, optional layer.

Yes. Voice AI systems use streaming speech-to-text, which transcribes audio as the caller speaks instead of waiting for them to finish. That's what lets the assistant start formulating a response immediately and reply without an awkward pause. Batch transcription — processing a whole recording afterward — is the slower cousin used for call summaries and records.