The availability of increasingly powerful computers at relatively low cost and new advances in automatic speech recognition software have led to an explosion of applications of this technology in the past few years.
Today there are several different versions of automatic speech recognition software to choose from.
These programs can process naturally spoken continuous speech where the words blend together. The newest versions of speech recognition software are dramatically better in converting speech to print in real-time than the systems of 5 years ago. The most current continuous speech recognition systems and those that will be available in the near future are speaker dependent. These systems must learn the voice pattern of the individual before they can work with accuracy. This is usually accomplished by a simple training tutorial built in the software, which enables the computer to learn the user's voice patterns.