Microsoft Says Its Speech Recognition Software Has Achieved 'Human Parity'

Despite its potentially widespread applications, creating a speech recognition software capable of cutting through the nuances and variations in the spoken word has been a task fraught with patchy success, at best. The aim many companies have striven toward is to create a software that can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a human would -- a key requisite for a truly immersive artificial intelligence experience. In a major breakthrough in this endeavor, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had created a technology that enabled speech recognition systems to transcribe a conversation with the same error rate as their human counterparts. "We've reached human parity," Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said in a statement. "This is an historic achievement."