When AI Can Transcribe Everything

That is until last year, when Microsoft built one that could. Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is an area that has gripped the firm's chief speech scientist, Xuedong Huang, since he entered a doctoral program at Scotland's Edinburgh University. "I'd just left China," he says, remembering the difficulty he had in using his undergraduate knowledge of the American English to parse the Scottish brogue of his lecturers. "I wished every lecturer and every professor, when they talked in the classroom, could have subtitles." In order to reach that kind of real-time service, Huang and his team would first have to create a program capable of retrospective transcription.