The popularity of smartphones opened up the opportunity to add voice recognition technology into consumer pockets, while home devices, like Google Home and Amazon Echo, brought voice recognition technology into living rooms and kitchens. While voice recognition technology originated on PCs, it has gained acceptance in both business and consumer spaces on mobile devices and in home assistant products. A voice recognition program runs many times faster if the entire vocabulary can be loaded into RAM, as compared with searching the hard drive for some of the matches. In practice, the size of a speech recognition system effective vocabulary is directly related to the random access memory capacity of the computer in which it is installed. A comparator checks these stored patterns against the output of the A/D converter - an action called pattern recognition.

The speech patterns are stored on the hard drive and loaded into memory when the program is run.

For a computer to decipher a signal, it must have a digital database, or vocabulary, of words or syllables, as well as a speedy means for comparing this data to signals. Voice recognition technology on computers requires that analog audio be converted into digital signals, known as analog-to-digital conversion. Voice recognition systems enable consumers to interact with technology simply by speaking to it, enabling hands-free requests, reminders and other simple tasks. Voice recognition has gained prominence and use with the rise of AI and intelligent assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. Voice or speaker recognition is the ability of a machine or program to receive and interpret dictation or to understand and carry out spoken commands.

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