List of speech recognition software

Speech recognition software is available for many computing platforms, operating systems, use models, and software licenses. Here is a listing of such, grouped in various useful ways.

Acoustic models and speech corpus (compilation)

The following list presents notable speech recognition software engines with a brief synopsis of characteristics.

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Operating system	Programming language	Supported language, note	Offline or online
CMU Sphinx	HMM		BSD style	Cross-platform	Java	English, German, French, Mandarin, Russian	Offline
HTK	HMM neural net		HTK specific	Cross-platform	C	English; version 3.5 released December 2015
Julius	HMM trigrams		BSD style, non-commercial	Cross-platform	C	Japanese, English;	Offline
Kaldi	Neural net		Apache	Cross-platform	C++	English
RWTH ASR	RWTH Aachen University		RWTH ASR, non-commercial use only	Linux, macOS	C++	English
Whisper	Encoder/decoder transformer		MIT license	Cross-platform	Python (programming language)	Multilingual	Online and Offline

Cross-platform web apps based on Chrome

The following list presents notable speech recognition software that operate in a Chrome browser as web apps. They make use of HTML5 Web-Speech-API.

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Price	Note
Speechmatics	Cloud based and on-premise automatic speech recognition			From £0.06 per minute of audio

Mobile devices and smartphones

Many mobile phone handsets, including feature phones and smartphones such as iPhones and BlackBerrys, have basic dial-by-voice features built in. Many third-party apps have implemented natural-language speech recognition support, including:

Application name	Description	Open-source	License	Price	Note
Assistant.ai	Assistant for Android, iOS and Windows Phone		, freeware	Free	Discontinued
Dragon Dictation			, freeware	Free
Google Now	Android voice search		, freeware	Free
Google Voice Search			, freeware	Free
Microsoft Cortana	Microsoft voice search		, freeware	Free
Siri Personal Assistant	Apple's virtual personal assistant		, freeware	Free
Alexa – Amazon Echo	Amazon's personal assistant
SILVIA	Android and iOS
Vlingo

Windows

Windows built-in speech recognition

The Windows Speech Recognition version 8.0 by Microsoft comes built into Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.
Speech Recognition is available only in English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese and only in the corresponding version of Windows; meaning you cannot use the speech recognition engine in one language if you use a version of Windows in another language. Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 8 Pro allow you to change the system language, and therefore change which speech engine is available. Windows Speech Recognition evolved into Cortana (software), a personal assistant included in Windows 10.

Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 third-party speech recognition

Braina – Dictate into third party software and websites, fill web forms and execute vocal commands.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications – Successor to the older DragonDictate product. Focus on dictation. 64-bit Windows support since version 10.1.
Tazti – Create speech command profiles to play PC games and control applications – programs. Create speech commands to open files, folders, webpages, applications. Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions.
Voice Finger – software that improves the Windows speech recognition system by adding several extensions to it. The software enables controlling the mouse and the keyboard by only using the voice. It is especially useful for aiding users to overcome disabilities or to heal from computer injuries.

Microsoft Speech API

The first version of the Microsoft Speech API was released for Windows NT 3.51 and Windows 95 in 1995, it was then part of Windows up to Windows Vista. This initial version already contained Direct Speech Recognition and Direct Text To Speech APIs which applications could use to directly control engines, as well as simplified 'higher-level' Voice Command and Voice Talk APIs. Speech recognition functionality included as part of Microsoft Office and on Tablet PCs running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. It can also be downloaded as part of the Speech SDK 5.1 for Windows applications, but since that is aimed at developers building speech applications, the pure SDK form lacks any user interface, and thus is unsuitable for end users.

Built-in software

Microsoft Kinect includes built-in software which allows speech recognition of commands.
Older generations of Nokia phones like Nokia N Series used speech-recognition with family names from contact list and a few commands.
Siri, originally implemented in the iPhone 4S, Apple's personal assistant for iOS, which uses technology from Nuance Communications.
Cortana (software), Microsoft's personal assistant built into Windows Phone and Windows 10.

Interactive voice response

The following are interactive voice response systems:

CSLU Toolkit
Genesys
HTK – copyrighted by Microsoft, but allows altering software for licensee's internal use
LumenVox ASR
Tellme Networks; acquired by Microsoft

Unix-like x86 and x86-64 speech transcription software

Janus Recognition Toolkit
Mozilla DeepSpeech was developing an open-source Speech-To-Text engine based on Baidu's deep speech research paper.
Weesper Neon Flow – professional voice-dictation software that provides offline speech-to-text processing on macOS and Windows using local AI models. It is not open source and offers a paid subscription after a 15‑day free trial.

Discontinued software

IBM VoiceType
IBM ViaVoice – Embedded version still maintained by IBM. No longer supported for versions above Windows Vista. Untested above macOS 10.4 or on Macintoshes with an Intel chipset.
Quack.com; acquired by AOL; the name has now been reused for an iPad search app.
SpeechWorks from Nuance Communications.
Yap Speech Cloud – Speech-to-text platform acquired by Amazon.com.