Microsoft makes history: human-like speech recognition achieved

Those results were pretty close to human performance but still short. That previous best is no longer valid as that same team has made history in speech recognition. In the same test, Microsoft's speech recognition system managed a 5.9% WER. When the team compared those results with human transcriptionists, they were identical, making the speech recognition software as accurate as human beings when it comes to writing/reciting words spoken to them. Geoffrey Zweig, who manages the Speech & Dialog research group, was happy to finally make this breakthrough.