Speech-to-text converts spoken audio into written text, powering both dictation tools that let people type by talking and live captioning systems used for meetings, broadcasts, and video calls. It benefits people with motor disabilities who find typing difficult, people who are deaf or hard of hearing relying on live captions, and non-native speakers following along with unfamiliar audio.
Accuracy varies with accents, background noise, and technical vocabulary, which is why professionally reviewed captions are still preferred over raw automatic speech-to-text output for anything formal, like published video content or legal proceedings.