Microsoft hits a speech recognition milestone with a system just as good as human ears

It's a red-letter day at Microsoft Research: a team working on speech recognition has hit a serious symbolic goal with a system that's as good as you at hearing what people are saying. Specifically, the system has a "word error rate" of 5.9 percent, on par with professional human transcribers. Even they don't hear things perfectly, of course, but 94 percent accuracy is more than good enough for conversation. "This accomplishment is the culmination of over twenty years of effort," said Geoffrey Zweig, one of the researchers, in a Microsoft blog post. Indeed, speech recognition is one of those tasks that's been pursued for decades by pretty much every major tech business and research outfit.