Microsoft's new breakthrough: AI that's as good as humans at listening... on the phone ZDNet

Microsoft's speech-recognition AI could eventually be used to enhance Cortana's accessibility features, say, for deaf people. Microsoft researchers have developed a system that recognizes speech as accurately as a professional human transcriptionist. Researchers and engineers from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group have set a new record in speech recognition, achieving a word error rate of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent reported a month ago. The word error rate is the percentage of times in a conversation that a system, in this case a combination of neural networks, mishears different words. Microsoft's system performed as well as humans who were asked to listen to the same conversations.