Speech recognition systems have progressed to the point where humans can interact with computing devices by relying on speech.  Such systems employ techniques to identify the words spoken by a human user based on the various qualities of a received audio input.  Speech recognition combined with natural language understanding processing techniques enable speech-based user control of a computing device to perform tasks based on the user's spoken commands.  The combination of speech recognition and natural language understanding processing techniques is referred to herein as speech processing.  Speech processing may also involve converting a user's speech into text data which may then be provided to various text-based software applications. 
Speech processing may be used by computers, hand-held devices, telephone computer systems, kiosks, and a wide variety of other devices to improve human-computer interactions.