Speech to text for voice agents
Speech to text is the component that converts a caller's spoken words into written text a voice agent can actually process. In a live phone conversation, it needs to be both fast and accurate, since it's the very first step in the entire response pipeline.
Why accuracy matters more than it might seem
If speech to text mishears even a key word or two, the language model responds to something the caller didn't actually say, which can derail an otherwise well configured conversation. Accuracy directly affects how reliable the whole system feels.
Handling real world audio conditions
Phone calls often include background noise, varying accents, and imperfect audio quality, all of which make speech to text a harder problem in this context than transcribing a clean studio recording.
Balancing speed and accuracy
Since speech to text is the first stage in the response pipeline, it directly affects overall latency, which means providers often need to balance transcription accuracy against processing speed to keep the conversation feeling responsive.
Frequently asked
Quality varies by provider and audio conditions, but modern speech to text systems generally handle typical phone call audio quite well, including most common accents.
More in Technical
A voice agent system is typically built from a few connected layers, a telephony layer that handles the actual phone connection, a speech processing layer that converts audio to text and back, and a language model layer that decides what to say.
Voice AI architecture generally follows a pipeline, speech to text converts what's said into text, a language model decides on a response, and text to speech converts that response back into audio, all repeated for each turn of the conversation.
A voice agent API generally lets you send leads into a calling campaign programmatically, trigger and manage campaigns through code, and pull call data, transcripts, and outcomes back into your own systems on demand.
See speech to text working on a live call.
We'll walk through a technical demo in a 15 minute session.
