Reaching new records in speech recognition - Watson

Depending on whom you ask, humans miss one to two words out of every 20 they hear. In a five-minute conversation, that could be as many 80 words. Imagine, though, how difficult it is for a computer? Last year, IBM announced a major milestone in conversational speech recognition: a system that achieved a 6.9 percent word error rate. Since then, we have continued to push the boundaries of speech recognition, and today we've reached a new industry record of 5.5 percent.