Microsoft's Speech Recognition Tech Is Officially as Accurate as Humans

A study published last Monday, heralded as an historic achievement by Microsoft, details a new speech recognition technology that's able to transcribe conversational speech as well as humans -- or at least, as best as professional human transcriptionists (which is better than most humans). The technology scored a word error rate (WER) of 5.9%, which was lower than the 6.3% WER reported just last month. "[I]t's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task," Microsoft reports. The rate is the same as (or even lower than) the human professional transcriptionists who transcribed the same conversation. "We've reached human parity," says Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist.