Mircosoft surpasses IBM's Watson in speech recognition

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. A team of Microsoft researchers has achieved the lowest error rate for speech recognition on record at 6.3%, overtaking prior record holder IBM Watson's 6.9%. The news brings the company one step closer to getting computers to understand speech as well as a person, and helps in its efforts to provide conversation as a service through tech like Cortana, Skype Translator, and other language-related cognitive services. Voice is going to emerge as a dominant computing interface.