Speech recognition is essentially a technology that enable computers to recognise the natural human voice.

Over the last few years, this technology has matured to the point that it is now being used in a wide range of commercial applications as computers can now, quite literally, understand the content of a conversational sentence.

A caller's spoken word is transmitted over a telephone into a computer, where it is sent to a specialised 'recogniser' and broken into little pieces of sound called phonemes. Each individual sound of the caller's voice can be identified and matched to a predefined list of phrases the caller would say.