Speech Recognition Tutorial for iOS

Learn how to transcribe live or pre-recorded audio in your iOS app with the same engine used by Siri in this speech recognition tutorial for iOS. By Jeff Rames.

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Usage Guidelines

While they aren’t yet clearly defined, Apple has provided some usage guidelines for Speech Recognition. Apple will be enforcing the following types of limitations:

  • Per device per day
  • Per app per day (global limitations for all users of your app)
  • One minute limitation for a single utterance (from start to end of a recognition task)

Apple hasn’t provided any numbers for device and app daily limits. These rules are likely to mature and become more concrete as Apple sees how third party developers use the framework.

Apple also emphasizes that you must make it very clear to users when they are being recorded. While it isn’t currently in the review guidelines, it’s in your best interest to follow this closely to avoid rejections. You also wouldn’t want to invade your user’s privacy!

Finally, Apple suggests presenting transcription results before acting on them. Sending a text message via Siri is a great example of this: she’ll present editable transcription results and delay before sending the message. Transcription is certainly not perfect, and you want to protect users from the frustration and possible embarrassment of mistakes.

Where to Go From Here?

You can download the completed sample project here. In this speech recognition tutorial for iOS, you learned everything you need to know to get basic speech recognition working in your apps. It’s an extremely powerful feature where the framework does the heavy lifting. With just a few lines of code, you can bring a lot of magic to your apps.

There isn’t currently much documentation on Speech Recognition, so your best bet is to explore the headers in the source for more detail. Here are a couple of other places to go for more info:

Questions? Comments? Come join the forum discussion below!

This speech recognition tutorial for iOS was taken from Chapter 7 of iOS 10 by Tutorials, which also covers the new changes in Swift 3, source editor extensions, Core Data updates, photography updates, search integration and all the other new, shiny APIs in iOS 10.

You’ll definitely enjoy the other 13 chapters and 300+ pages in the book. Check it out in our store and let us know what you think!