IBM sets new speech recognition accuracy record

IBM announced an important milestone in conversational speech recognition last year. The company managed to develop a system that achieves a 6.9 percent word error rate. Despite the success, IBM continued to work hard on its speech recognition technology and has recently achieved a new industry record of 5.5 percent. In an official blog post, the company said that the word error rate was measured with the help of recorded conversations between people discussing usual everyday topics like buying a car. These recordings, which are known as the "SWITCHBOARD" corpus, have been used in the industry to benchmark speech recognition systems for more than 20 years.