Now, A Tech That Recognises Words Like Humans Do

Researchers at Microsoft claimed to have developed the first technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as humans do. A team in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research created a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The system had a word error rate (WER) of 5.9% - the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. The research milestone does not mean the computer recognized every word perfectly. In fact, humans do not do that, either. Instead, it means that the error rate – or the rate at which the computer misheard a word like “have” for “is” or “a” for “the” – is the same as you would expect from a person hearing the same conversation. The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a person would. The milestone comes after decades of research in speech recognition, beginning in the early 1970s with DARPA, the US agency tasked with making technology breakthroughs. This accomplishment is the culmination of over twenty years of effort. The milestone will have broad implications for consumer and business products that can be significantly augmented by speech recognition. That includes entertainment devices like the Xbox, accessibility tools such as instant speech to text transcription and personal digital assistants such as Cortana.