Microsoft (MSFT) Overtakes IBM in the Race for Speech Recognition Supremacy

Last week, Google parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) released a report about their new milestone in artificial inteligence [AI] speech recognition that according to the company outperforms existing technology by 50%. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) did not want to be left behind as it too announced an amazing breakthrough for this market. According to Xuedong Huang, chief speech scientist for Microsoft, their researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3%. It is considered the lowest in the industry. Microsoft recorded the benchmark rate by combining neural network based acoustic and language modeling on the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2000 Switchboard speech recognition task. This is a conversational telephone speech recognition test used as an industry standard.