Microsoft Speech Recognition Now As Accurate As Professional Transcribers (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Microsoft announced today that its conversational speech recognition system has reached a 5.1% error rate, its lowest so far. This surpasses the 5.9% error rate reached last year by a group of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and puts its accuracy on par with professional human transcribers who have advantages like the ability to listen to text several times. Both studies transcribed recordings from the Switchboard corpus, a collection of about 2,400 telephone conversations that have been used by researchers to test speech recognition systems since the early 1990s. The new study was performed by a group of researchers at Microsoft AI and Research with the goal of achieving the same level of accuracy as a group of human transcribers who were able to listen to what they were transcribing several times, access its conversational context and work with other transcribers.

Comments

Laughable Hype

[bwanagary]

On a daily basis in my work environment Microsoft technology is used to a) record voicemail and b) generate text from the speech.  Never, ever, have I received any converted voicemail that wasn't completely unintelligible gibberish.  Seriously.  This is utter nonsense.

Errors are not Errors

[idji]

When a human transcriptionist makes a mistake you can usually work out what they meant. When Speech-to-text (STT) makes a mistake it is often gibberish. So objectively it is "better" at transcribing, but subjectively much worse.

"As Accurate As Professional Transcribers"

[Anonymous Coward]

"As Accurate As Professional Transcribers..."

They left out "from Uzbekistan transcribing Navajo - underwater".

Never trust anything Clippy say.