SpeechRecognition: unspokenPunctuation property
Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.
The unspokenPunctuation property of the
SpeechRecognition interface specifies whether the speech recognition engine will infer and insert punctuation marks based on the user's natural speech patterns.
Value
A boolean value.
- If set to
true, punctuation will be inferred and inserted automatically. - If set to
false(the default), no punctuation will be inserted automatically.
Description
By default, text output by the Web Speech API's speech recognition engine is unpunctuated. To get this text ready for presentation, an additional step is required to add punctuation in appropriate places, for example by manual editing, or using some kind of Natural Language Processing (NLP) model to infer punctuation. Users can help by manually speaking punctuation (for example, stopping to say "comma" or "question mark"), but this still normally requires processing and is inconvenient.
This process can be made much easier by using the unspokenPunctuation property. Setting it to true causes the speech recognition engine to automatically infer and insert punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, and question marks) based on the user's natural pauses, grammatical structure, and prosody.
For example, speaking the line
"I am hungry [insert pause] and I must eat soon."
would result in the engine outputting
"I am hungry, and I must eat soon."
The output is not always perfect, but it results in text that is much closer to presentation quality than when unspokenPunctuation is not used.
Examples
Basic usage
The following code creates a new SpeechRecognition object instance using the SpeechRecognition() constructor, then specifies that it should infer punctuation marks by setting unspokenPunctuation to true:
const recognition = new SpeechRecognition();
recognition.unspokenPunctuation = true;
See this in action in the Web Speech API Playground.
Specifications
| Specification |
|---|
| Web Speech API # dom-speechrecognition-unspokenpunctuation |