Microsoft's speech recognition engine listens as well as a human

When humans try to transcribe a spoken conversation all in one go, they manage to miss 5.9 percent of what they hear on average. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that, for the first time, they've managed to get a computer to perform that same transcription task just as well as a person. "We've reached human parity," Microsoft's chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang, said in a statement. To accomplish the 5.9 percent error rate, which beats a 6.3 percent record set just last month, the Microsoft team leveraged neural language models resembling associative word clouds. That is, a word like "fast" resides much closer to "fast" than it does to "slow".