Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software. Recognizing the speaker

Speaker recognition

Speaker recognition is the computing task of validating a user's claimed identity using characteristics extracted from their voices .There is a difference between speaker recognition and speech recognition . These two terms are frequently confused, as is voice recognition...

 can simplify the task of translating speech.

Speech recognition is a broader solution that refers to technology that can recognize speech without being targeted at single speaker—such as a call

Call

Call may refer to:* A type of betting in poker* Animal communication, a song or noise made by an animal such as:** Bird call, part of a bird song* A command in square dancing, delivered by a caller* Call option, a term in stock trading...

 system that can recognize arbitrary voices.

Speech recognition applications include voice user interface

Voice User Interface

A Voice–user interface makes human interaction with computers possible through a voice/speech platform in order to initiate an automated service or process....

s such as voice dialing (e.g., "Call home"), call routing (e.g., "I would like to make a collect call"), domotic appliance control, search (e.g., find a podcast where particular words were spoken), simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number), preparation of structured documents (e.g., a radiology report), speech-to-text processing (e.g., word processor

Word processor

A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....

s or email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

s), and aircraft

Aircraft

An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...

 (usually termed Direct Voice Input

Direct Voice Input

Direct Voice Input is a style of Human-Machine Interaction "HMI" in which the user makes voice commands to issue instructions to the machine...

).
In the health care

Health care

Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...

 domain, even in the wake of improving speech recognition technologies, medical transcriptionists (MTs) have not yet become obsolete.