Does voice recognition drain your laptop or phone’s battery?
Voice-to-text software can be significantly faster than typing. They also reduce the physical strain on your fingers by reducing the amount of keyboard typing.
We also use voice recognition software on our laptops and smartphones. But can voice recognition software drain your laptop or smartphone’s battery?
Does voice recognition software drain your laptop’s battery?
Whether voice recognition software will drain your laptop’s battery depends on the type of voice recognition software you use.
There are two major types of voice recognition apps: Online voice recognition software and offline voice recognition software. Generally, online voice recognition software consumes less battery power than offline voice recognition software.
Online software performs the voice-to-text conversion by sending your voice to remote servers. They don’t run any voice recognition locally on your laptop.
On the other hand, offline voice recognition software performs the voice-to-text conversion using your laptop’s CPU or GPU. Therefore, offline voice recognition software can consume more battery power.
Does voice recognition software drain your smartphone’s battery?
How much voice-to-text software will drain your smartphone’s battery depends on the voice recognition software you use.
Both online and offline voice-to-text applications are available for smartphones. However, the most popular voice-to-text software applications on smartphones are online apps.
Online voice-to-text apps only consume battery power for internet connectivity. They send your voice to remote servers to perform voice recognition.
Therefore, if you use online voice recognition software on your smartphone, the battery drain is usually insignificant.
Offline vs. online speech recognition: Which consumes more battery power?
Generally, offline voice recognition software consumes more battery power.
Offline voice-to-text software uses your laptop or smartphone’s CPU or GPU to perform the voice-to-text conversion. This requires the CPU/GPU to run at higher frequencies, consuming more battery power.
On the other hand, online voice recognition software only sends your voice data to remote servers. It is the remote servers that perform the voice-to-text conversion. As a result, online voice recognition software only consumes battery power for voice data transmission.
How to reduce the battery drain of speech recognition software
If you are conscious of the battery drain of your laptop or smartphone, you should use online voice recognition apps. As we have said, online voice recognition consumes significantly less battery power than offline recognition.
You can also reduce the data costs by using Wi-Fi instead of mobile data for voice recognition apps on your smartphone.
Also, experiment with different voice-to-text apps and find the one with the minimal battery drain.