The capability of a computer to recognize and understand a human speech signal in order that it might act on spoken commands. Speech recognition software relies on highly complex mathematical algorithms to accomplish the process of converting human speech into a form that a computer can understand. Speech recognition allows a caller to interact with a computer system in natural conversational voice mode, i.e., by speaking to the machine just as you would speak to another person. Applications include data entry, menu navigation, document creation, and telephone dialing. (Note: Computers are programmed not to respond well to cursing, which pretty much makes speech recognition useless, in my opinion.) See also IVR and speech-to-text.