title: How to get started with speech-to-text?
body: <p>I'm really interested in speech-to-text algorithms, but I'm not sure where to start studying up on them. A bunch of searching around led me to <a href="http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/download.html" rel="noreferrer">this</a>, but it's from 1996 and I'm fairly certain that there have been improvements since then.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone who has any experience with this sort of stuff have any recommendations for reading / source code to examine? Or just general advice on what I should be trying to learn about if I want to get into the world of writing speech recognition programs (sometimes it's hard to know what to search for if you don't have much knowledge about the domain).</p>
  
  <p>Edit: I'd like to do something cross-platform, but for the moment I'd be targeting linux. </p>
  
  <p>Edit 2: Thanks csmba for the well-thought out reply. At this point in time, I'm mainly interested in being able to create applications that allow automation, or execution of different commands through voice. So, a limited amount of recognizable commands being able to be strung together. An example would be a music player that took commands like "Play the album Hello Everything by Squarepusher", or an application launcher that allowed the user to create voice-shortcuts to launch specific apps.</p>
  
  <p>I realize that it's a pretty giant problem, and that I have nowhere near the level of knowledge required right now to tackle implementing an entire recognition engine, although the techniques involved with doing so fascinate me, and it is something I'd like to work myself up to doing. In all likelihood, I'll probably end up picking up a book or two on the subject and studying up / playing with "simple" implementations in my free time.</p>