Microsoft's AI is getting crazily good at speech recognition

Microsoft's speech recognition efforts have hit a significant milestone. It can now transcribe human speech with a 5.1% error rate, Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang wrote in a blog post -- the same error rate as humans. Microsoft actually thought it hit this point last year, when it reached 5.9%, the word error rate it had measured for humans. But then other researchers carried out separate studies and pegged the human error level as slightly lower, 5.1%. But it has now achieved this -- reducing its error rate by 12%, and using AI techniques like "neural-net based acoustic and language models."