Microsoft develops first human-like speech recognition system

In a major breakthrough in the field of speech recognition, Microsoft researchers have created a technology that accurately recognises the words in a conversation like humans do. The team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 per cent, down from the 6.3 per cent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 per cent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard "Switchboard" speech recognition task. This is an historic achievement," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist in a Microsoft blog post. The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would. In doing so, the team has beat a goal they set less than a year ago -- and greatly exceeded everyone else's expectations as well. "Even five years ago, I wouldn't have thought we could have achieved this.