Automatic Speech Recognition — the technology that converts spoken audio into text. Also called STT (Speech-to-Text). Mo…

The strategic decision between building a capability in-house (open-source models, custom development) versus purchasing…

A hosted service accessed over the internet via HTTP/WebSocket APIs. Cloud APIs for STT/TTS offer easy integration and n…

Speaker diarization is the process of partitioning an audio stream into segments according to the speaker identity — ans…

A photorealistic AI-generated video avatar that replicates a specific person's appearance, voice, and behavioral pattern…

A comparative ranking system borrowed from chess, used in TTS benchmarks to measure perceived audio quality. Models are …

A single neural model that processes audio input and produces audio output directly, without separate STT → LLM → TTS st…

A communication mode where both parties can speak and listen simultaneously, like a phone call. In voice AI, full-duplex…

General Data Protection Regulation — the EU regulation governing personal data processing. For voice AI, GDPR requires e…

Graphics Processing Unit — specialized hardware originally designed for graphics rendering, now widely used for deep lea…

The process of running a trained neural model on new input data to produce predictions or outputs. In voice AI, inferenc…

The delay between a request and its response. In voice pipelines, latency is the sum of STT processing time + LLM genera…

The synchronization between the movement of a speaker's lips and the audio being played. In video avatar systems, lip-sy…

Large Language Model — a neural network trained on large text corpora to understand and generate natural language. In a …

Vendor lock-in occurs when switching costs (technical, contractual, or operational) make it difficult to change provider…

Mergers and Acquisitions — corporate transactions where companies are combined or purchased. In the voice AI market, M&A…

Mean Opinion Score — a subjective audio quality metric where human listeners rate speech on a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (e…

Deployment model where software runs on servers physically located within an organization's own data center or controlle…

Software whose source code is publicly available and can be freely used, modified, and distributed. In voice AI, open-so…

Personally Identifiable Information redaction — the automatic detection and removal or masking of sensitive personal dat…

The patterns of rhythm, stress, and intonation in speech. In TTS, prosody control determines how natural and expressive …

Running an open-source model or software on your own infrastructure (cloud VM, on-premise server, or edge device) rather…

Data sovereignty refers to the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance structures of the country or ju…

State Space Model — a class of neural architectures (e.g., Mamba, S4) that process sequences more efficiently than Trans…

Speech Synthesis Markup Language — an XML-based markup language that provides a standard way to annotate text for speech…

In voice pipelines, streaming refers to the ability to process and transmit audio incrementally, without waiting for the…

In video avatar systems, streaming latency is the delay between receiving audio input and displaying the corresponding a…

Speech-to-Text — the conversion of spoken audio into written text. The first stage of a voice pipeline. Key metrics: WER…

A neural network architecture based on self-attention mechanisms, introduced in 2017. Transformers are the foundation of…

Time To First Audio — the latency between sending a text request to a TTS engine and receiving the first audio chunk. TT…

Text-to-Speech — the conversion of written text into spoken audio. The final stage of a voice pipeline. Key metrics: TTF…

An AI-generated animated video representation of a person, capable of speaking with synchronized lip movements. Streamin…

The ability to synthesize speech that mimics a specific person's voice characteristics (timbre, accent, prosody) from a …

The end-to-end chain of components that enables a conversational voice AI: STT (transcription) → LLM (reasoning/generati…

Word Error Rate — the standard accuracy metric for STT systems. Calculated as (Substitutions + Deletions + Insertions) /…