Twilio Speech Recognition is a powerful addition to voice applications powered by the TwiML verb . Instead of just taking DTMF tones as input you can use the full expressiveness of spoken language in a variety of languages.

We’ll build a hotline that returns facts about cats, numbers, and Chuck Norris to have some fun with this feature and also show its usefulness in interactive voice response (IVR) applications. If you learn best from video or just want to see this in action, this full tutorial is available on the Twilio YouTube channel:

The code for the application is available in this repo on Github.

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We’ll use Twilio Functions to build our application. If you’re new to Twilio Functions you can follow this video tutorial to learn how it works. Since Twilio Functions runs inside the Twilio Runtime there are no prerequisites for this project other than signing up for a free Twilio account and getting a voice-enabled Twilio phone number.