Microsoft's Speech Recognition is Now as Good as a Human Transcriber

Microsoft recently announced that its conversational system for speech recognition has achieved a 5.1 percent error rate, its best performance to date. This beats the 5.9 percent error rate achieved in October of 2016 and put its accuracy at the same level as professional human transcribers, who can listen to text multiple times, access cultural context, and collaborate with other transcribers. After the 2016 study, other researchers set the human parity rate at a 5.1 percent error rate. Therefore, even using the more conservative standard, the system has achieved human parity. The recordings that formed the basis of both studies came from the Switchboard collection, a research collection of thousands of telephone conversations used to test speech recognition systems since the early 1990s.