NLP & Language · intermediate · concept 128 of 311 · Updated Nov 4, 2026
Speech Recognition (ASR) & Whisper
Turning audio into text. Whisper made near-human transcription open source and free to run on a laptop, trained on 680,000 hours of web audio in 90-plus languages. ASR is the front door of voice assistants, meeting notes, subtitles, and every voice-first AI interface.
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Top AI contributors on this
- Yoshua BengioLawZero / Université de Montréal
- Ilya SutskeverSafe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
- Noam ShazeerOpenAI
- Alec RadfordIndependent / Thinking Machines Lab (adviser)
- Jürgen SchmidhuberKAUST / IDSIA
- Oriol VinyalsDiscovery Loop
Key terms
ASRMel spectrogramWhisperWord error rateDiarization
Learn these first
Where you meet it in the real world
Meeting transcription, voice assistants, call-center analytics, subtitles, medical dictation
Videos
▶ Automatic Speech Recognition - An Overview ↗
Microsoft Research · YouTube
Guides and articles
Courses, papers, and more