IBM researchers achieve new records in speech recognition

IBM researchers have set a milestone in conversational speech recognition by achieving a new industry record of a 5.5 percent word error rate, surpassing its previous record of 6.9 percent, according to the company's blog post. The researchers conducted a difficult speech recognition task to achieve this record, where they recorded conversations between humans discussing typical everyday topics like "buying a car." This recorded corpus, titled "SWITCHBOARD", has been used for over two decades to benchmark speech recognition systems. To achieve the 5.5 percent record, the researchers focused on extending the company's application of deep learning technologies by combining LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) and WaveNet language models with three strong acoustic models. The first two models were six-layer bidirectional LSTMs, with one of the models being equipped with multiple feature inputs and the other being trained with speaker-adversarial multi-task learning.