Microsoft hits new record for AI speech recognition

Microsoft recently reached a new milestone in its ability to recognize conversational speech, achieving a 5.1% word error rate (WER). The achievement, detailed in a Sunday blog post, bests Microsoft's previous record of 5.9% and is closer to human parity. The new WER was achieved through the use of Switchboard. According to the blog, "Switchboard is a corpus of recorded telephone conversations that the speech research community has used for more than 20 years to benchmark speech recognition systems." Using Switchboard, speech recognition systems are tasked with transcribing conversations about topics such as politics or sports, for example.