Microsoft's AI can now understand speech better than humans - TechRepublic

Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) technology can now recognize conversational speech slightly better than humans who do so professionally, according to recently-released research from the company. Microsoft recently got its AI's error rate in understanding speech down to about 5.9% from 6.3%, which puts it slightly below the human error rate, which is also close to 5.9% "We [improved] on our recently reported conversational speech recognition system by about 0.4%, and now exceed human performance by a small margin," the report stated. This news comes a mere month after Microsoft announced that it had reached an error rate of 6.3%, at the time setting a record among its peers. However, Microsoft's research also noted that error rates of human transcribers can vary between 4.1% to 9.6%, depending on how carefully they perform the transcription. SEE: AI experts weigh in on Microsoft CEO's 10 new rules for artificial intelligence Still, the closeness in quality to human transcription is impressive.