Microsoft's breakthrough speech recognition system is such a good listener

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research branch have created a speech recognition system that can pick up the words in a conversation as well as most humans can. The new system was announced by Microsoft in a blog post and the team's findings were published on Monday. The record-breaking tech has hit what the team is calling "human parity" -- that is, it's not perfect, but it makes the same or fewer mistakes in transcription than human professionals. The word error rate of the system was down to 5.9 percent, from the 6.3 percent error rate reported just last month. That's more impressive than it sounds, as humans will commonly mishear words like "have" for "is", or "a" for "the" in transcribing.