or voice recognition
Ability of computer systems to accept speech input and act on it or transcribe it into written language.
Current research efforts are directed toward applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR), where the goal is to transform the content of speech into knowledge that forms the basis for linguistic or cognitive tasks, such as translation into another language. Practical applications include database -query systems, information retrieval systems, and speaker identification and verification systems, as in telebanking. Speech recognition has promising applications in robotics , particularly development of robots that can "hear." See also pattern recognition .