What is a Phoneme?

A phoneme is the smallest element of speech. As an example, the word "dog" is represented by the phonemes dawg. There are about 50 phonemes in the English language.

Phonemes play an important role in speech recognition technology. Speech recognition allows, for example, a person to speak into a microphone and have word-processing software type what they're saying. In contact centers, interactive voice response (IVR) systems use speech recognition to allow callers to interact with menus by speaking commands.

Speech recognition software turns speech into phonemes and the converts the phonemes into digital representations (ones and zeroes). The digital phonemes are then run through a very large data dictionary to determine what words are being spoken. The software also compares the phonemes to those around them to provide context, which makes the translation more accurate. As a result, words can be typed and IVR commands can be executed. Phonemes – tiny elements of speech – enable powerful technical capabilities.