What is an example of speech recognition?

An example of speech recognition is your phone typing a message while you speak it. The microphone captures sound, a model maps it to words, and text appears.

Other everyday examples: asking Siri or Google Assistant a question, saying "representative" to a phone menu, automatic captions on YouTube, and a car changing the radio station on command.

The two types of speech recognition worth knowing are speaker-independent systems, which work for anyone out of the box, and speaker-dependent ones, which train on your voice for higher accuracy. Automatic speech recognition, ASR, is the umbrella term for all of it. Dictation is simply ASR pointed at writing instead of commands.

Dictation is the most useful example to adopt: a speech to text program turns talk into finished writing.