Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The phrase "voice recognition" is often used to refer to recognition software that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 and Dragon Dictate for mac. Training can simplify the task of translating speech to text.

Speech recognition is a different solution which can recognise speech without being targeted at single speaker—such as the Telstra system that can recognize arbitrary voices. It has a very small vocabulary as it only listen for keywords and does not make sense of complete sentences ( with grammar).

Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 software is the first type of speech to text technology - a single trained speaker can achieve very high accuracy with some basic voice training. Dragon Naturally Speaking is the most advanced and accurate speech recognition software available today - it is optimised for local Australian accents - and is the most effective way to convert speech to text.