Comparing Google's AI Speech Recognition To Human Captioning For Television News

Most television stations still rely on human transcription to generate the closed captioning for their live broadcasts. Yet even with the benefit of human fluency, this captioning can vary wildly in quality, even within the same broadcast, from a nearly flawless rendition to near-gibberish. At the same time, automatic speech recognition has historically struggled to achieve sufficient accuracy to entirely replace human transcription. Using a week of television news from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive, how does the station-provided primarily human-created closed captioning compare with machine-generated transcripts generated by Google's Cloud Speech-to-Text API? Automated high-quality captioning of live video represents one of the holy grails of machine speech recognition. While machine captioning systems have improved dramatically over the years, there has still been a substantial gap holding them back from fully matching human accuracy.