Seven things that actually improve speech to text accuracy

People tend to treat speech recognition accuracy as a fixed number — either the tool is good or it is not. In practice the same tool, same person and same sentence can produce clean text or a mess depending on conditions you control. These are the ones that make a real difference, roughly in order of impact.

1. Deal with background noise first

Noise degrades recognition more than anything else on this list. A café, a running taxi, a fan directly beside the phone — each forces the system to separate your voice from competing sound, and errors climb sharply. Moving somewhere quieter helps more than any setting you could change.

2. Stop holding the phone at arm's length

Distance is the second biggest factor and the easiest to fix. A phone held at chest height picks up considerably more room noise relative to your voice than one held near your mouth. You do not need to speak into it closely — just stop dictating from across the desk.

3. Speak normally, not carefully

This one is counter-intuitive. Slowing right down and over-enunciating usually makes results worse, because modern systems are trained on natural speech and use the rhythm of ordinary sentences as information. Talking like a robot removes that. Speak at your normal pace, just do not mumble.

4. Say the punctuation you care about

Say full stop, comma or new line where you want them. Automatic punctuation is decent but it is guessing at your intent, and long paragraphs are where it guesses wrong. Ten seconds of saying your punctuation beats a minute of adding it afterwards.

5. Set the right language before you start

Dictating Amharic while the app is set to English does not produce a partial result, it produces confident nonsense — the system finds the closest English-sounding match for every Amharic word. Whenever output looks wildly wrong rather than slightly wrong, check this before anything else.

6. Handle mixed-language sentences deliberately

Real Ethiopian speech mixes Amharic and English inside single sentences, and mixed input is genuinely harder for any system than a single language. If a passage matters, dictate it in one language and add the other terms afterwards. If it is a chat message, do not bother — good enough is good enough.

7. Accept that names will be wrong

People's names, place names and product names are the hardest category for every speech recognition system, because they are not predictable from context the way ordinary words are. Expect to fix them. If you dictate the same name constantly, it is faster to fix it once and reuse the text than to keep re-recording.

What none of this fixes

No amount of technique rescues audio that was bad when recorded. If you are transcribing something already captured in a noisy room on a distant microphone, the ceiling is set. Everything above is about the recording you are about to make, which is the one you can still control.