Sorting out voice technologies

On the occasion of Amazon's purchase of Ivona, The Verge has a good article sorting out various voice technologies.

 Key bit:

Text-to-speech: reads text that's already been written into something approaching a human-sounding voice (Ivona, AT&T, Microsoft, many others);

Speech-to-text: transcribes what you say word-for-word into text (Dragon, Yap);

Voice recognition: biometric that knows who you are based on your voice (like in Sneakers);

Natural-language AI: transcribes speech and/or parses text, looking for keywords and structure to turn ordinary sentences into computer queries (Siri's core technology).

Those interested in voice tech should click through.