Microsoft's Cortana boosts speech recognition accuracy

A new milestone in human speech recognition has been reached by Microsoft, matching the accuracy of trained human transcribers. The firm's software, used in its Cortana voice assistant, has achieved a 5.1 per cent margin of error, putting it on a par with professionals. One of the big frustrations of voice recognition has been getting machines to accept commands, a process which often involves repetition and exaggerated speech. The development means the company's products will soon accept orders with super-human precision. A new milestone in human speech recognition has been reached by Microsoft, matching the accuracy of trained human transcribers.