What open-sourced and accurate speech-to-text engines and APIs currently exist?
Instead of speech-to-text (STT), Wikipedia has “Speech recognition” [1], otherwise known as automatic speech recognition (ASR). Wikipedia also has a higher level “Category:Speech recognition” [2]; under which, you can find a “List of speech recognition software” [3]. In terms of open source, Wikipedia includes an entry for “Speech recognition in Linux” [4].
Of course, Nuance is the industry leader. AT&T is also promoting their “Watson Voice Recognition Technology & Speech API” [5]. Red Shift Company [6] offers “RASR Speech Recognizer”. Koemei API [7] offers speech to text for video transcription. Google also has their undocumented HTML5 Chrome speech API. And in Windows, there is the Microsoft Speech API [8].
In terms of open source, CMUSphinx and their PocketSphinx [9] are probably most popular. There is also the iOS version of PocketSphinx, called OpenEars [10]. There is an open source JavaScript SpeechAPI [11], similar to the MIT WAMI (Web-Accessible Multimodal Applications) toolkit [12]. Julius [13] is an open source example of “large vocabulary continuous speech recognition” (LVCSR).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Speech_recognition
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition_in_Linux
[5] http://www.research.att.com/projects/WATSON
[6] http://www.redshiftcompany.com
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API
[9] http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/?s=pocketsphinx
[10] http://www.politepix.com/openears
[11] http://speechapi.com