US Patent 10074360 Providing an indication of the suitability of speech recognition

This relates to providing an indication of the suitability of an acoustic environment for performing speech recognition. One process can include receiving an audio input and determining a speech recognition suitability based on the audio input. The speech recognition suitability can include a numerical, textual, graphical, or other representation of the suitability of an acoustic environment for performing speech recognition. The process can further include displaying a visual representation of the speech recognition suitability to indicate the likelihood that a spoken user input will be interpreted correctly. This allows a user to determine whether to proceed with the performance of a speech recognition process, or to move to a different location having a better acoustic environment before performing the speech recognition process. In some examples, the user device can disable operation of a speech recognition process in response to determining that the speech recognition suitability is below a threshold suitability.