With the Web Speech API, we can recognize speech  using JavaScript. It is super easy to recognize speech in a browser using JavaScript and then getting the text from the speech to use as user input. We have already covered  How to convert Text to Speech in Javascript.

But the support for this API is limited to the Chrome browser only. So if you are viewing this example in some other browser, the live example below might not work.

This tutorial will cover a basic example where we will cover speech to text. We will ask the user to speak something and we will use the SpeechRecognition object to convert the speech into text and then display the text on the screen.

The Web Speech API of Javascript can be used for multiple other use cases. We can provide a list of rules for words or sentences as grammar using the SpeechGrammarList object, which will be used to recognize and validate user input from speech.

For example, consider that you have a webpage on which you show a Quiz, with a question and 4 available options and the user has to select the correct option. In this, we can set the grammar for speech recognition with only the options for the question, hence whatever the user speaks, if it is not one of the 4 options, it will not be recognized.

We can use grammar, to define rules for speech recognition, configuring what our app understands and what it doesn’t understand.

JavaScript Speech to Text

In the code example below, we will use the SpeechRecognition object. We haven’t used too many properties and are relying on the default values. We have a simple HTML webpage in the example, where we have a button to initiate the speech recognition.

#javascript #programming