Speech-to-textSTT
Speech-to-text (STT) is the technology that converts spoken audio into written words. It is the umbrella term covering live dictation, file transcription, captioning, and voice commands.
The conversion is performed by a speech recognition model, which may run in the cloud (audio is uploaded to a server) or on-device (audio never leaves the machine). The choice determines both privacy properties and offline behavior.
Raw STT output is a transcript: lowercase-ish, lightly punctuated, with fillers and false starts intact. Products built on STT differ mostly in what they do after recognition, from nothing at all to a full formatting pass.
Related terms
