Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does.

In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month.

The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it’s the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task.

Get all the details on Next at Microsoft.

Athima Chansanchai

Microsoft News Center Staff

Tags: Microsoft Research, speech recognition